






BOOKS 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 
?S z^n^ 

©^nrr 6np)jrig|t Pa, 

Shelf ...HS-FI, 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



'^^^'^ FROM -^iSfe*. 
THE BOOKS OF 



LAURENCE HUTTON 



The dainties that are bred in a book ' 




JUL 25 18S: 



NEW YORK 

HARPER AND BROTHERS 

MDCCCXCII 



ZijZ)3 



\ / 






^*";<^i 



Copyright, 1892, by Hakpek & Brothers. 

Ail rights reserved. 



/; 



TO 
CHARLES B. FOOTE 

AND 

BEVERLY CHEW 

BOOK LOVERS BOTH 

THIS BOOK ABOUT BOOKS 



^ 



PREFACE 



FROM THE BOOKS OF my own library, 
comfortably rich in the literature of the sev- 
enteenth and the eighteenth centuries, I have 
gathered these oddities and curiosities of Books. 

The chapters upon "Some American Book- 
plates," and upon *' Grangerism and the Gran- 
gerites," were published originally in the Book- 
buyer ; the chapter upon " The Portraits of 
Mary Queen of Scots " appeared in the Cen- 
tury Magazine ; the chapters upon " Portrait 
Inscriptions," and upon " Poetical Inscrip- 
tions," were printed in Harper^ s Bazar; and the 
chapter upon " Poetical Dedications " first saw 
the light in the Princeton Revieio. They have, 
all of them, been revised, and some of them 
have been rewritten ; and they contain not a 
little additional matter gathered from the desul- 
tory reading of later j^ears. 

In the quotations, both in prose and in verse, 
the original spelling has been retained as far as 
possible. The Index is made for the benefit 



of all Bookmen ; and the absolutely blank leaves 
disconnecting the various chapters, that each 
may be separately extra-illustrated, is a conces- 
sion to what is considered the depraved taste of 
the Grangerites. 

The little volume, as it here appears, is in- 
scribed not only to the Book - knower who is 
more familiar with every branch of my subject 
than I can pretend to be, but to the Book- 
lover who may care, perhaps, to glean from its 
pages certain odd and curious facts concerning 
the dainties that are bred in Books. 

Laurence Hutton. 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. PAGE 

I. ON SOME AMERICAN BOOK-PLATES 3 

11. ON GRANGERISM AND THE GRANGERITES . . 33 

III. ON THE PORTRAITS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS 59 

IV. ON SOME PORTRAIT INSCRIPTIONS 83 

V. ON POETICAL DEDICATIONS 131 

VI. ON POETICAL INSCRIPTIONS 155 



ON SOME AMERICAN BOOK- 
PLATES 




CHAPTER I 
ON SOME AMERICAN BOOK-PLATES 

OW many book -buyers and 
book-lovers in this civilized 
country, and in this enlight- 
ened nineteenth century, 
have any knowledge of 
Book-plates? With boiler-plates, and 
butter-plates, and racing-plates, and fash- 
ion-plates the average reader is perfectly 
familiar ; but Book-plate to him means 
nothing at all, or it means what it is not. 
Go to a large retail book -shop in any 
one of the leading American or British 
cities during the busy holiday season, 
and ask the frequenters what they know 
upon this subject. Nine hundred and 
ninety-nine out of every thousand never 
possessed a Book-plate; nine hundred 
and fifty have seen Book-plates, but do 
not know what they are; and nine hun- 



dred and twenty - seven never heard of 
Book-plates at all. Yet Book-plates are 
almost as old as the printing of books; 
and the production of them, at one time, 
was nearly as common as the manufacture 
of the volumes they marked. 

Book-plates are not the engraved plates 
which are used in the illustrating of 
books, nor are they the stereotyped plates 
from which books are printed ; they are 
the engraved or printed labels, of any 
form or design, which, pasted in the inside 
of the front covers of books, serve to de- 
note the ownership thereof. They vary 
greatly in style, according to the period 
to which they belong, or to the taste or 
social position of their possessors; from 
the fantastic and primitive designs of Al- 
bert Diirer to the graceful and artistic ex- 
amples of Abbey or Bracquemond ; from 
the elaborate quarterings of an hundred 
coats-of-arms in the volumes of Vere de 
Vere, to the simple John Fiske in the 
tomes of the author of " The Outlines of 
Cosmic Philosophy." 

The term Book-plate is awkward, and 
confusing to the uninitiated. It origi- 



nated in England in the middle of the 
eighteenth century, and has since been 
used generally by English-speaking peo- 
ples. The Latin Ex Libris (" From The 
Books Of "), still employed by the French 
and other Latin races of the Continent, is 
much more happy. Etymologists and 
linguists may perhaps find traces of it in 
the literal translations so often to be seen 
in the limited private educational libraries 
of both sides the Atlantic at the present 
day. Ex Libris Gidiebni Stubbsi is un- 
questionably the parent of " Bill Stubbs, 
One of his Books." 

The earliest Book-plate known to col- 
lectors is German, and is believed to be- 
long to the later years of the fifteenth cen- 
tury. The oldest dated Book-plate, also 
German, contains the figures 1516; and a 
number of highly-prized specimens bear 
the well-known initials "A. D,," but un- 
fortunately no date. They were designed, 
although, as it is believed, not etched or 
engraved, by Albert Diirer (1471-1528), 
who is called " the Father of Book- 
plates." 

But few English Book-plates which are 



earlier than the Restoration are said to 
exist. The oldest known example, bear- 
ing an engraved date, is of the year 1 574 ; 
and William Marshall, so prolific in fron- 
tispieces of English books during a great 
part of the seventeenth century, is the 
first English artist who is known to have 
signed a Book-plate, and that in 1662. 
Other specimens of early English Book- 
plates contain the signatures of such well- 
known artists as George Vertue (1684- 
1756), Hogarth (1697- 1764), Bartolozzi 
(1730-1813), and Thomas Bewick (1753- 
1828). 

The strange absence of these designat- 
ing marks in England during the many 
years they are known to have been so 
common in other countries, is attributed 
to the fact that a great number of the 
more richly bound volumes in English 
libraries contained their owners' crests, 
stamped on the outside of the leather 
binding. The earliest English examples 
of these marks, whether within or with- 
out the covers, were simply coats -of - 
arms, with no mottoes or names. Only 
nobles or wealthy persons or corporations 



could own books at that period ; and ar- 
morial bearings were considered a suffi- 
cient mark of proprietorship. They were, 
of course, familiar to all brother collec- 
tors, and at the same time they were 
more easily recognized and deciphered 
by the lower orders, who could not read 
written or printed words. These heral- 
dic devices in a great many instances 
have been followed by later British bib- 
liophiles. In France, on the other hand, 
we find bright and fantastic designs, 
plays upon proper names, ingenious mon- 
oirrams, drawings characteristic in some 
way of their owner's profession or posi- 
tion in life, all of them unconventional 
and imaginative, the French differing 
as greatly from their neighbors over 
the Channel in their Book-plates as in 
their art generally, or in their literature 

itself. 

The earliest examples of American Ex 
Libris, like the English, are heraldic in 
style ; but they are no more American 
than is the copy of the King James Bible 
or of the Book of Common Prayer, in 
the cover of which they found their way 



to New England or to the Carolinas from 
the Mother Countr}-. Many of them, nev- 
ertheless, are of great interest now, and 
are as valuable in their way as are Knick- 
erbocker knick-knacks or colonial chairs, 
because of their association with the fa- 
mous families who made our early history 
for us. or their association with the Fa- 
thers of the Republic who fought for our 
rights to design our own Book - plates, 
and who gave us the glorious privilege, for 
so many years, of pirating the British 
books into which we put them. 

Among the colonial Book-plates in 
possession of the collectors are those of 
the Washingtons, the Beverleys. the Lees, 
and the Byrds of Virginia; the Penns 
and Hopkinsons of Pennsylvania ; the 
Vaughans and Pepperills of Maine ; the 
Ouincys, the Royals, the Olivers of 
Massachusetts ; the Carrolls and Magills 
of Mar>'land ; and the Schuylers. the Mor- 
rises, the Clintons, and the Livingstons 
of New York. 

The most interesting American Book- 
plate to an American is. naturally, that of 
the Father of his Countn,-. John and An- 



drew Washington arrived in Virginia in 
1657. during the Protectorate, bringing 
with them, besides their principles and 
their integrity, the heraldic symbols of 
their family. Their crest gave us a na- 
tional shield, and suggested our flag, 
while it has marked their books during 
several generations of Washingtons both 
in the Colonies and in the States. Some 
fifteen years ago a number of volumes 
were advertised for sale, and were sold, in 
Philadelphia, which purported to have 
belonged to the private libran,- of General 
Washington at Mount Vernon ; they all 
contained Book-plates, but it is believed 
that neither the Book-plates nor the 
books were genuine. They certainly did 
not possess the authenticated pedigree of 
the specimens now preserved in the Li- 
bran,- of the Boston Athenaeum and else- 
where. 

That John Franklin, brother of Benja- 
min Franklin and son of a non-conformist 
tradesman in England, was entitled to 
bear the arms he engraved in his books is 
ven,' doubtful ; but there can be no ques- 
tion that the Washingtons and their social 



peers, north and south of the Potomac, 
had every right to the crests they used. 

One of the earhest and most interesting 
of colonial Book-plates is that of " Will- 
iam Byrd, of Westover in Virginia, Es- 
quire." The famous Westover Mansion, 
on the James River, about two hours' sail 
below Richmond, was for at least two 
generations of Byrds the vice-regal court 
of Virginia. It might have served as a 
model for that New Castlewood on the 
beautiful banks of the Potowmack, to 
which Colonel Esmond, of blessed mem- 
ory, took his dear spouse in the reign of 
the first George, to pass the delightful 
Indian summer of their lives, thankful 
for its rest and sweet sunshine. 

William Byrd, the earliest American of 
that name, came to this country in 1674, 
seventeen years after the arrival of the 
Washingtons, and fifty-six years before 
the immigration of the Esmonds. He in- 
herited the estates from an uncle, and 
settled near the falls of the James River, 
on the site of the City of Richmond, The 
Westover Mansion was built a few years 
later. 



William Byrd was barely of age when 
he left the Mother Country. He acquired 
great wealth as a planter and an Indian 
trader, and at the time of his death, and 
for many years previously, he was Re- 
ceiver General of his Majesty's Revenues 
for the Colony. He was succeeded by his 
only son, the second William Byrd, who, 
like the Warringtons some generations 
later, was sent to England for his educa- 
tion. He was a student of the Middle 
Temple, a fellow of the Royal Society, 
and, according to the inscription on his 
monument at Westover, a man of great 
accomplishments, who " made a happy 
proficiency in light and varied learning," 
was "thrice appointed Publick Agent to 
the Court and Ministry of England," and 
"after being for thirty -seven years a 
member, at last became President of the 
Council of the Colony." He survived his 
father forty years. The third and last 
William Byrd, also a man of mark and 
influence in the Colony, is believed to 
have died soon after the outbreak of the 
Revolutionary War. The famous West- 
over Manuscripts, first published in 1841, 



were written from 1728 to 1736, by Will- 
iam Byrd, second. 

The Byrd Book-plate is, unfortunately 
unsigned and undated, but it probably 
belonged to the author of the Westover 
Manuscripts, and was engraved during 
his residence in London. Its owner, no 
doubt, ordered it in England upon the re- 
ceipt of his appointment, carrying it and 
the books it marked, with the rest of his 
household goods, to the new country to 
which he had been sent. It is presum- 
ably older than the Ex IJbris of " Robert 
Elliston, Gent. Comptrol"" of His Majes- 
tie's Customs of New York in America 
MDCCXXV.," which came into the pos- 
session of Mr. Richard C. Lichtcnstein, 
of Boston, a few years ago, and is the 
earliest known heraldic American Book- 
plate bearing a date and the address of 
its owner. The engraving, which is pure- 
ly Jacobean in style, is too fine, however, 
to have been done by any colonial artist 
as early as 1725. 

The earliest distinctively American 
Book-plates are, naturally, those which 
are the work of the earliest American en- 



13 



gravers — Hurd, Callender, Turner, Daw- 
kins, Revere, Doolittle, the Mavericks, 
and Anderson. Of these, Nathaniel Hurd 
was not only the first, but the best. He 
was born in Boston in 1729. His father, 
also a native American, was a goldsmith 
in that city, and the younger Hurd was 
his apprentice, turning his attention par- 
ticularly to engraving on copper. The 
first plate executed by him is believed by 
Mr. Lichtenstein — a recognized authority 
on such subjects — to have been the Ex 
Libris of Thomas Bering. It bears the 
initials NH, and was dated 1749, when 
the artist was barely out of his teens. 
Hurd was considered the foremost cutter 
of dies and seals on this continent, and 
for thirty years — he died in 1777 — he en- 
graved Book-plates for a great number of 
prominent families and societies through- 
out the Colonies, including those of Har- 
vard College. 

Henry Dawkins, an Englishman long- 
resident here, engraved the Book - plate 
of John Burnet, of New York, signing it 
in full, and dating it 1754, five years 
after the Bering plate by Hurd. Of 



14 



Dawkins very little is known. He was 
originally a worker in metals, designing 
and moulding fancy buttons and the like 
in New York. Dr. Anderson told Dunlap 
that he remembered seeing ornamental 
shop-bills and " coats-of-arms for books," 
which Dawkins had engraved before the 
year 1775. But until recently, when Mr. 
Beverly Chew, of New York, discovered 
in a copy of Tonson's edition of Pope's 
Homer this Ex Libris of John Burnet, no 
trace of Dawkins had been found in this 
country earlier than 1760, when he signed 
the frontispiece of a Collection of Psalms, 
Tunes, etc., published in Philadelphia a 
year later. The natural supposition now 
is that the Book-plate was engraved in 
Philadelphia or New York. A writer in 
the Magazine of American History speaks 
of Dawkins as having been arrested for 
counterfeiting in 1776, and of his petition 
to be hung rather than suffer the long 
confinement to which he was sentenced. 
Whether he was hanged, imprisoned, or 
pardoned is not recorded. 

The second native American engraver 
was Paul Revere (1735-1818). A number 



15 



of his Book-plates are familiar to collec- 
tors, and are as rare and as valuable as is 
the "Landing of British Troops " or " Bos- 
ton Massacre" (1770), by which he is 
known to those of his fellow-countrymen 
who know that he was an engraver at all. 
He was apprenticed to a goldsmith, and, 
without a master, he learned the art of 
engraving on copper. As an enthusias- 
tic and ever-active patriot, the work in 
which he took the greatest pride, no 
doubt, was the paper money of the Com- 
monwealth of Massachusetts (1775). This 
he designed, engraved, and printed ; con- 
structing with his own hands the primi- 
tive press from which it was issued. He 
was the typical Yankee boy, who, before 
he's sent to school, well knows the mys- 
teries of that magic tool, the pocket- 
knife, and who, before he dies, not only 
makes the machine, but makes the ma- 
chine that makes it. 

That art in this country is in its in- 
fancy is proved by the fact that a con- 
temporary of the earliest of the American 
engravers lived to see the work of the 
men of the present day, and to compete 



i6 



with it ; that the father of wood-engrav- 
ing in America laid down his tools less 
than a quarter of a century ago. Alex- 
ander Anderson was born in the City of 
New York in 1775. When a lad of twelve 
he made his first attempt at his art with 
a graver which he had fashioned out of 
the back-spring of his old penknife, and 
on a copperplate rolled out of the pennies 
given him to buy a new one. At the age 
of fourteen he was apprenticed to a phy- 
sician ; he studied medicine for five years, 
and was licensed to practice in 1795. But 
the passion for engraving was too strong 
to be resisted, and all his leisure time was 
devoted to it. He supplied the news- 
papers with the small figures of houses, 
ships, mechanics' arms, and runaway ne- 
groes, cut on type-metal, with which they 
illustrated their columns of wants, when 
Washington was President, and James 
Duane or Richard Varick was Mayor of 
New York ; and twenty-five years before 
the death of Paul Revere, Anderson was 
a professional engraver, and a ripe and 
good one. In 1793, when employed in 
copying drawings on wood after Bewick 



17 



for an American edition of " The Look- 
ing Glass," he discarded the type-metal 
upon which he had been working through 
half the volume, cut the rest of the illus- 
trations upon boxwood, with tools of his 
own invention and construction ; and 
signing his name to the first wood -cut 
published on this continent, he gained for 
himself the title of the American Bewick. 

Anderson continued in the daily prac- 
tice of his profession almost up to the time 
of his death, at a great age, in 1870; and 
until Abel Bowen began to engrave upon 
wood in Boston in 181 2, he had no com- 
petitor in this country in that branch of 
his art. He illustrated many books of 
all classes — a catalogue of which has late- 
ly been printed by Mr. Charles C. Moreau, 
of New York,, for private circulation — and 
he made a number of Book-plates, includ- 
ing his own and one of Columbia College. 

Doolittle (i 754-1 832) and the Mave- 
ricks began their professional lives not 
much earlier than Anderson, but they 
ended them almost half a century before 
he cut his last block. Doolittle was a 
native of Connecticut, self-taught, and 



i8 



the author of a copperplate view of 
" The Battle of Lexington," engraved from 
a drawing by an eye - witness, and pub- 
lished, with other plates of like character, 
in New Haven in 1775. These were be- 
lieved for some time to have been the 
earliest specimens of engraving of histor- 
ical subjects executed in America. Paul 
Revere antedated him, however, by sev- 
eral years. 

Peter R.Maverick (17 5 5-1 807), called 
Peter Maverick the first, and his son 
Peter Maverick (1780-1831), etched and 
engraved in New York many Book- 
plates, which are highly prized by the 
collectors. The younger Maverick is best 
known as an engraver of bank-notes, and 
as the instructor of Asher B. Durand, 
who became his partner in 1817. 

There is but a small band of collectors 
of Book-plates in the United States, and 
it is only within a few years that this 
harmless but interesting hobby-horse has 
been saddled and ridden here. The late 
James Eddy Mauran, of Newport, had 
thirty -five hundred examples of all na- 
tions and all ages, and Mr. Richard C. 



19 



"Lichtenstein possesses upwards of three 
thousand — all of which were kindly- 
placed at the disposal of the writer in 
the preparation of this chapter. Valua- 
ble and interesting as these are, they seem 
very meagre in quantity by the side of the 
twenty thousand specimens which Mr. J. 
J. Howard, of Dartmouth, near Black- 
heath, England, a founder of the Har- 
leian Society, and editor of Miscella7iea 
GeJiealogica, has gathered together dur- 
ing the last forty years. 

Book-plates are valuable and interest- 
ing for a number of causes ; on account 
of the artist who designed and engraved 
them, on account of their antiquity, their 
rarity, or on account of the personal qual- 
ities or position of the men and women 
whose books they mark. Plates that are 
signed, dated, or addressed are, of course, 
more interesting than those which have 
no such stamps; and of course the Ex 
Libris of a Daniel Webster, an Edward 
Everett, a William H. Prescott, or a Win- 
field Scott, is of more value than are 
those which are simply Book-plates and 
nothing more. All these Book-plates, 



too, are naturally of infinitely greater val- 
ue in the books their owners read and 
loved, and in which their owners put 
them, than, when torn from their proper 
homes, they are gathered together in the 
asylum of a collector's album. Mr. An- 
drew Lang, in " The Library," says that 
any one of twenty coats-of-arms on leath- 
er is worth one hundred times the value 
of the volume which the leather covers. 
If this be true, and it is true, of the per- 
sonal marks on the outsides of books, it 
is certainly quite as true of the marks 
within. There are many editions and 
many copies of the poems of Jean Inge- 
low, and the Ex Libris of Charlotte Cush- 
man is not at all uncommon, but Miss 
Cushman's own copy of Jean Ingelow, 
containing Miss Cushman's Book-plate, 
is worth, for Miss Cushman's sake, an en- 
tire edition of " The Old Days and the 
New," published after Miss Cushman's 
death, and to be bought now for a few 
shillings. 

Miss Cushman is one of the few Amer- 
ican women whose coat-of-arms, or whose 
name, is to be found upon American 



Book-plates at the present time. To Mrs. 
Elizabeth Graem Ferguson belongs, it is 
said, the distinguished honor of having 
been the first of her sex on this conti- 
nent to mark her books in this way. 
She was a lady of literary ambitions, who 
translated — but never published — " Tele- 
machus " into blank verse before she was 
out of her teens, and who printed a num- 
ber of original poems in the later years 
of her life. She was born in Philadelphia 
in 1739, and she died in the same city in 
1 801. No copy of her Book-plate, which 
was heraldic in design, is now known to 
the collectors ; but she figures m Alli- 
bone's " Dictionary of Authors," and some 
specimens of her verse are to be found in 
Griswold's " Female Poets of America," in 
Duyckinck's "Cyclopaedia," and in Sted- 
man and Hutchinson's " Library of Amer- 
ican Literature." 

M. Poulet- Malassis, in "Les Ex Libris 
Frajigaz's'' (Paris, 1874), declares that 
"the eighteenth century was the golden 
era of Book-plates, the designs and the 
mottoes were so witty, so brilliant, so ec- 
centric, and so varied." This may have 



been true of the Ex Libris of France, but 
it is hardly true of British and American 
Book-plates of the same period. It is 
only within a decade or two that the Eng- 
lish-speaking bibliophiles have marked 
their books, to any extent, with other 
than heraldic symbols, and to such sym- 
bols, in many instances, the book-lovers 
on our side of the Atlantic had no right 
whatever. A well-known American fam- 
ily abandoned, not long ago, the crest 
which it had borne upon its silver, its 
carriages, and its books for four or five 
generations, upon discovering that it had 
sprung from a family whose crest was 
entirely different, or who had no crest 
at all. Nothing was needed by Hurd or 
by Maverick but a surname and a work 
on heraldry ; the connection between the 
coat-of-arms and the man who bore the 
name being a matter of as much indiffer- 
ence to engraver and to purchaser then 
as it is, in their grandsons' time, to Tiffany 
and to Brentano. The Poulet-Malassis of 
a hundred years ago, on the other hand, no 
doubt, playing upon his own name, justi- 
fied his descendant's claims for his vari- 



23 



ety, eccentricity, brilliancy, and wit by de- 
signing for himself an Ex Libris upon 
which was engraven an uneasy hen on an 
uncomfortable nest, and some punning 
motto, in choice old French, about " Foul 
Play," or " My pretty chickens and their 

dam." 

This is hardly more fantastic or in- 
genious than is a well-known Book-plate 
of a much later date, on which the two 
towers of Notre Dame de Paris are made 
to form the initial capital H, while across 
the entire front of the cathedral are seen 
the letters U. G. O. ; and over the top of 
all, in a flash of lightning, is engraven the 
legend ''Ex Libris V\qX.ox Hugo." It is 
hardly possible to conceive of any of the 
British poets of a hundred years before 
Hugo's time, when the golden era of 
Book-plates existed in France, and the 
golden era of books existed in England, 
as indulging in an Ex Libris so eccentric, 
so brilliant, or so witty as this. 

In marked contrast with the Ex Libris 
of the French poet is that of the Ameri- 
can professor who is doctor as well as 
poet, and who has travelled, in his One 



24 



Hoss Shay, from the Atlantic to the far 
ends of the land, singing Songs of Many 
Seasons and in Many Keys, and carrying 
help and comfort to thousands of patients 
who never saw his face, but whose bruised 
hearts have blessed him, and still bless 
him, for their healing. The books in his 
library bear the image of "The Cham- 
bered Nautilus," that 



"Ship of pearl, which, poets feign, 
Sails the unshadowed main, — 
The venturous bark that flings 
On the sweet summer wind its puqiled wings 
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings, 
And coral reefs lie bare, 

Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their stream- 
ing hair." 



"If you will look into Roget's ' Bridge- 
water Treatise,' " said the Autocrat one 
morning, "you will find a figure of one 
of these shells and a section of it. The 
last will show you the series of enlarging 
compartments, successively dwelt in by 
the animal that inhabits the shell, which 
is built in a widening spiral. Can you 
find no lesson in this ?" 



25 



** Build thee more stately mansions, O m.y soul, 

As the swift seasons roll ! 

Leave thy low-vaulted past ! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 

Till thou at length art free. 
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea." 

George Bowland drew for the author 
of " The Poets of America" a Book-plate -^ C€-»C^*w»-' 
upon which is seen Pan piping with all 
his heart, in Syracusan times, and in 
haunts of shepherd, nymph, and satyr, the 
prelude of some pastoral ditty, to fauns 
who knew not Wall Street and nothing 
cared for trade or last quotations. The 
motto " Le Coeur au Metier " was sug- 
gested to Mr. Stedman by Mr. Matthew 
Arnold, who, in his address to the mem- 
bers of the Authors Club, in 1883, urged 
all men of letters, as well as all men of af- 
fairs, to put their hearts into their work. 
Of this Book-plate three sizes have beeii 
engraved ; the smallest, covering hardly 
more space than a postage - stamp, fits 
beautifully in, and ornaments, the Elze- 
virs of the seventeenth century and the 
midget folios of this, which are among 
its owner's collection of precious books. 



26 



Mr. Aldrich's Book-plate contains a 
comic mask, surmounted by a black bird 
in the act of uttering sweet music, and it 
is intended, perhaps, to represent a Daw, 
and to be symbolic of Margery of that 
name. Mr. Lawrence Barrett's plate had 
the Mask of Tragedy on an open volume, 
with torch and dagger; and its motto was 
Esto quod esse videris. Mr. Booth's books 
are marked with a crest, and the niotto, 
Quod ero spero. 

Mr. Brander Matthews's Book - plate, 
designed by Mr. Edwin A. Abbey, is pecul- 
iarly fitting to an American, who is not 
only a collector of French dramatic liter- 
ature and the author of the " Theatres of 
Paris" and of " French Dramatists of the 
Nineteenth Century," but is also the au- 
thor and editor of books relating to the 
American stage, and the writer of Amer- 
ican plays. It represents the aboriginal 
American's discovery of a Greek comic 
mask, and the legend, taken from Mo- 
liere, asks him, " What think you of this 
comedy?" 

The variety and the ingenuity of the Ex 
Libn's of the present day in this country 



27 



are shown in these examples. Others are 
more fantastic, and all are intended to be 
symbolic of the profession or of the taste 
of the men to whom they belong. Mr. 
George W. Childs, of Philadelphia, places 
the pen where he thinks it should be, 
above the sword. Mr, Edward Eggleston 
selects a monk reading, with a nimbus and 
a star above his head, and this line in old 
English characters, " Flie fro' the presse 
and dwell with sothfastnesse ;" and Mr. 
Dean Sage, an enthusiastic fisherman and 
collector of the literature of the gentle 
art he loves, puts into his copy of the 
" Treatyse of Fysshyinge with an Angle," 
or into his first edition of " The Complete 
Angler," that rod, that net, and that tim- 
orous trout, which, we are told, are the 
Contemplative Man's Recreation. 

It may be remarked in passing that 
Book-plates in books do not always prove 
the ownership of the volumes which con- 
tain them. We have seen how the Ex 
Libris of Washington was forged ; and it 
is said that a dealer in London to whom 
application was made for a specimen of 
the Ex Libris of David Garrick, con- 



28 



fessed that he had none for sale, except 
in the books of Garrick's day, in which he 
(the dealer) had pasted them, finding, 
by so doing, that the books and Book- 
plates brought better prices ! The col- 
lecting of Ex Libris, however, has pre- 
served many interesting examples which 
would naturally, every year, be lost or de- 
stroyed in re-binding by ignorant work- 
men who have no knowledge of their 
value, or which are concealed and lost 
under later Ex Libris pasted above them. 
And it must be confessed, in closing, 
that all collectors, no matter what they 
may collect, are in a measure destruction- 
ists, although they may claim that they 
destroy only to preserve. They have, 
sometimes, very little hesitation in burn- 
ing scores of cottages for the sake of tast- 
ing the crackling on their special breed 
of little pigs ; many priceless documents 
have been mutilated in order to obtain 
the easily duplicated signatures they con- 
tained ; many unique books have been 
defaced for the sake of the not very rare 
portraits bound within them ; or, to go 
back to the very beginning of "collect- 



29 



ing " in this country, many valuable heads 
have been spoiled in order to gratify the 
enthusiastic hobby of our aboriginal col- 
lectors of scalps ! 



ON GRANGERISM AND THE 
GRANGERITES 



CHAPTER II 



ON GRANGERISM AND THE GRANGERITES 




,HAT a certain class of bib- 
liomaniacs and bibliolaters 
should be denounced as bib- 
lioclasts and bibliophobians 
by all the great community 
of bibliocists, bibliophilists, bibliogra- 
phers, bibliopolists, bibliologists, biblio- 
pegists, bibliotaphists, bibliothecarys and 
bibliognostes would seem, to the lay 
mind, to imply a very serious condition of 
affairs. Yet this is, and has been, the 
position of the Grangerites since the foun- 
der of the sect published his great work, 
one hundred and twenty odd years ago. 
James Granger {cir. 1 716-1776) was Vic- 
ar of Shiplock, in Oxfordshire, and author 
of "A Biographical History of England 
from Elizabeth to the Revolution, Con- 
sisting of Characters Dispersed in Differ- 

3 



34 



ent Classes, and Adapted to a Methodical 
Catalogue of British Heads." It was 
" Intended as an Essay towards Reducing 
our Biography to a System ; and a Help 
to the Knowledge of Portraits," etc., and 
it contained a preface showing the "Util- 
ity of a Collection of Engraved Portraits 
to Supply the Defect and Answer the 
Various Purposes of Medals." (London, 
4^-1769.) To this was added, in 1806, by 
Mark Noble (i 784-1 827), rector of Barm- 
ing, in Kent, " A Continuation of Gran- 
ger's History, from the Revolution to the 
End of the Reign of George I.," the ma- 
terials having been supplied from the 
manuscripts left by Mr. Granger and from 
the collection of the editor himself. The 
first edition of Granger's work (1769) was 
in two quarto volumes, each in two parts 
— hence the erroneous impression that it 
appeared in four volumes, as did the lat- 
er editions, which were octavos. It was 
printed on one side of the page only, in 
order to facilitate the insertion of ad- 
ditional prints by the purchasers and 
subscribers ; and it was introduced by a 
Dedicatory Epistle to Horatio Walpole, 



35 



Esquire ; who, in return, after Granger's 
death, said, in print, that its author had 
drowned his taste for portraits in an ocean 
of biography ; and that, although he began 
by elucidating prints, he at last sought 
portraits, only that he might write the 
lives of the men they represented. Which 
sounds very much like Mr. Walpole. 

In 1773 Dr. Samuel Johnson, who did 
not realize how many of his own portraits 
would be known to the collectors of a 
century later, said: "Granger's ' Biograph- 
ical History' is full of curious anec- 
dotes, but might have been better done. 
The dog is a Whig. I do not like much 
to see a Whig in any dress, but I hate to 
see a Whig in a parson's gown." In 1776 
Mr. Boswell, who certainly did not realize 
that his own great work would be looked 
upon within an hundred years simply as 
a magnificent omnibus, into which Mr. 
Granger's disciples would crowd all the 
men of Boswell's own day, wrote from 
Edinburgh to Bolt Court : " I have, since 
I saw you, read every word of Granger's 
'Biographical History.' It has enter- 
tained me exceedingly, and I do not think 



36 



him the Whig that you supposed. Horace 
Walpole's being his patron is, indeed, no 
good sign of his political principles." 

Granger's History was the first book 
extended by the introduction of extra 
prints illustrative of its text; and Mr. 
Granger was the original Extra-illustra- 
tor, the father of the noble band of Gran- 
gerites. Unlike his descendants he wrote 
his book to illustrate his portraits ; he 
did not collect his portraits to illustrate 
his book. He was followed at once by 
other collectors, who wanted a valid ex- 
cuse for their collecting, and an asylum for 
their collections ; and Clarendon's " His- 
tory of the Rebellion and Civil War of 
England," Walton's "Lives," "The His- 
tory of the Worthies of England, Endeav- 
oured by Thomas Fuller, D.D.," John Au- 
brey's " Lives of Eminent Persons," and 
other contemporary historical and bio- 
graphical works, were extended and en- 
larged ; many lesser illustrated books suf- 
fering, naturally, 'for the benefit of these. 
Granger's collection of upwards of four- 
teen thousand portraits was sold after his 
death, A correspondent of the Gc7ttle~ 



37 



man's Magazine, for May, 1782, says that 
they were secured in one unbroken lot 
by Lord Mountstuart for /1500, but this 
was not the case. They were sold at 
auction by Mr. Greenwood in the Hay- 
market, April 6, 1778, and the following 
days, the catalogue describing them as 
*' dating from the earliest specimens of 
engraving to the present time." Lord 
Mountstuart, afterwards first Marquis of 
Bute, was a patron of Granger, and he is 
mentioned by Boswell in the letter to 
Johnson quoted above (August 30, 1776), 
as being anxious to find a proper person 
to continue Granger's work, upon Gran- 
ger's plan, offering to give such a person 
generous encouragement. 

The most cruel things that have ever 
been said about the Grangerites are to be 
found in "The Book Hunter." John 
Hill Burton (1809-1881) declared that the 
illustrator is the very Ishmaelite of col- 
lectors ; his hand is against every man 
who loves books, and every book-lover's 
hand is against his. He destroys un- 
known quantities of books for the sake of 
enriching a single volume of his own with 



38 



the portraits and other prints he finds 
in them ; and what is worse, as he does 
not always make his ravages known, many 
a book is sold to the unwary person, who 
is ignorant of the damaged condition of 
his purchase. Mr. Burton could tell tales, 
he said, fitted to make the blood run cold 
in the veins of the sincere book hunter 
about the devastations of the Grangerites, 
who are in his eyes literary Attilas, the 
Genghis Khans of literary plunder and pil- 
lage, spreading ruin and terror around 
them ; they are monsters — whether green- 
eyed or not he was not quite prepared to 
state — who do make the meat they feed 
upon, and becoming excited in their work, 
go on ever widening the circle of their 
purveyances, and opening new avenues 
towards the raw material on which they 
operate. Granger himself was conceded to 
have been an industrious and respectable 
compiler, however, and Mr. Burton hinted 
that he is not, perhaps, to be held respon- 
sible for all the harm done in his name. 
Dibdin also acquitted him of vialice pre- 
pense, although he asserted that Granger's 
History was published in an evil hour. 



39 



It is a matter of some surprise that the 
Grangerites, suffering for so many years 
from the abuse heaped upon them, have 
said so little in their own defense. Even 
Mr. Tredwell, in his " Plea for Biblioman- 
ia," apologizes for, rather than defends, 
the seductive art of privately illustrating 
books ; and confesses his own sins in cut- 
ting up a new garment, like the old lady 
in the fable, to mend an old one ; forget- 
ting that it is often possible and justifiable 
to restore old and treasured gowns and 
jackets with pieces taken from some new 
raiment which is hardly worth the making 
up, and certainly is not worth the wearing 
out. An honest patch is better than 
shoddy at its best. 

The Grangerites are, by no means, the 
only biblioclasts, nor the most persist- 
ent, nor the most ruthless. Mr. William 
Blades enumerated among " The Enemies 
of Books" (Trlibner & Co., London, 1880), 
fire, water, gas, heat, dust, neglect, book- 
worms, and other vermin, and even book- 
binders and collectors ! An extra insert- 
ed print of man, or beast, or house, or 
town, or field, or plain, does not always 



40 



mean the destruction or mutilation of 
some valuable volume which once con- 
tained it. It indicates, simply, the sur- 
vival of what in that book was most lit 
to be retained. In very many volumes 
which come from the printer's hands the 
illustrations are the best part, not infre- 
quently the only part of any worth what- 
ever. Thousands of ephemeral books 
and pamphlets have contained portraits 
of some "worthy," or views of some old 
theatre, or long demolished church, or 
palace, or public building, which tell bet- 
ter the story of their originals than all that 
their contemporaries ever wrote concern- 
ing them ; and, except for these prints, the 
appearance of these originals would be as 
much a matter of uncertainty now, and 
quite as incomprehensible, as is the art 
of a dead actor or the habits of the 
dodo. They were not saved to posterity 
by the books in which they were bound, 
but by the collectors and the Extra- 
illustrators who realized their worth, and 
who plucked them from the burning, or 
from the rag and bottle shop. Brandy 
peaches are not so good, perhaps, as ripe 



41 



peaches, but they are better than dried 
peaches, or than no peaches at all ; and 
they are available and valuable when 
fresh peaches cannot be obtained. On 
the shelves of the closets of hundreds of 
enthusiastic collectors of jam are jars 
of Clingstones and Morris Whites, which 
would have comforted and refreshed no 
man if they had been left to rot upon the 
trees on which they grew. 

Jonathan Richardson ( 1 66 5- 1 745) graph- 
ically described a portrait as " a general 
history of the life of the person it repre- 
sents ; not only to him who is acquainted 
with it, but to many others who, upon 
occasion of seeing it, are frequently told 
of what is most material concerning him 
or his general character, at least ; the face 
and the figure is also described, and as 
much of the character as appears by 
these, w^hich oftentimes is here seen in a 
very great degree." 

The earliest Grangerites were collec- 
tors of personal portraits only — of por- 
traits proper, as the word is now under- 
stood ; for in its primeval period all 
painting, whether of landscape or figure, 



42 



was called portraiture. The Pre-Ra- 
phaelites painted a portrait of a mount- 
ain, a mill, and a man, the mill sometimes 
being as big as the mountain and the 
man often covering more space than the 
mill — and all on one panel. The first 
human likeness, according to Pliny, was 
drawn in Greece, and the original artist 
was a Corinthian maiden, who, with the 
charred end of a stick, traced the profile 
of her lover on the white wall, upon which, 
from the light of her lamp, his shadow 
was cast. The early Roman warriors 
had their own portraits painted upon 
their shields ; and in the days of the Re- 
public none but those Romans whose fore- 
fathers had attained dignity in the state, 
or who themselves had worn the purple, 
were permitted to sit for their pictures at 
all. 

With engraved, etched, and printed por- 
traits alone, of course, the Grangeritcs 
deal ; and these go back only to the end 
of the fifteenth century, the earliest being 
from the grav^ers of Diirer and his contem- 
poraries. The first English engraved por- 
trait, according to Vcrtuc, was that of 



43 



Archbishop Parker, by R. Hogenberg, and 
it is dated 1572-73. The eariiest attempt 
at a collection of engraved portraits in 
one volume in England, according to Wal- 
pole, was Holland's *' Heroologia Angli- 
cana," folio, London, 1620; which even 
in Walpole's day was very rare. It was 
suggested to its publisher by a Flemish 
work of the same character printed two 
years previously. 

One of the earliest collectors of prints 
in England and one of the most enthu- 
siastic, was John Evelyn, whose learned 
essays on Engravers and Engravings, 
brought down to his own times, are de- 
lightful and instructive reading to all col- 
lectors in ours. In 1690 he wrote to 
Pepys — a brother collector, and a quon- 
dam pupil of his in that respect — a long 
letter full of good advice as to what to 
buy and where to buy it, closing as fol- 
lows : " I send you, sir, my face, such as 
it was of yore, but is now no more, tanto 
vmtata ; and with it what you may find 
harder to procure, the Earl of Notting- 
ham, Lord High Admiral, which .though 
it makes a gap in my poor collection, to 



44 



which it was glad, I most cheerfully be- 
stow upon 3^ou." Very rarely, indeed, in 
the history of man does one find such an 
instance of warm friendship as this, and 
it may be urged against Evelyn on this 
account, that he could not have been a 
collector in the proper sense of the word. 
A collector can exchange, but like the 
Old Guard he never surrenders ; and he 
will not make a gap in his own lot to 
please any man who ever lived. Pepys 
himself, long before this time, was an en- 
thusiast on the subject of portraits ; and 
in his Diary he records more than once 
his purchases and the pleasure they gave 
him. He even sent commissions to the 
dealers in Paris ; for on January 25, 1668, 
his wife " showed him many excellent 
prints, Nanteuil's and others, which at 
his desire had been brought to him out 
of France, of the king, of Colbert, and 
others, most excellent, and to his great 
content." There is no record of his hav- 
ing made any gaps in his collection, how- 
ever, to enrich the collection of anybody 
else. Of course, neither Evelyn, nor Pepys, 
nor their contemporaries were Granger- 



45 



ites. The name and the genus had not 
then been invented. They had no thought 
of the Extra -illustration of books, but 
bought their prints for the prints' own 
sake, and from the natural collecting in- 
stinct of man, who is a collecting animal. 

Of the art of collecting, and of the charm 
of collecting, much has been written, and 
much has been said, but nothing more 
keenly appreciative or more valuably in- 
structive than the words of love and wis- 
dom which Richard Marriot, in St. Dun- 
stan's Church-yard, in Fleet Street, printed 
in 1653 for the dear old linen-draper of ''Kr^a.t'Cft-vt 
Chancery Lane, who was a collector of 
Trouts in the Tamesis and the Lea. 

Your complete angler for prints is not 
the man who fishes in preserved waters, 
with priced-catalogues for fishing lines, 
and long bank-accounts for hooks ; nor is 
he the man who sends his agents to fish for 
him, as the Japanese have their dancing 
done, by proxy; nor j^et the superannu- 
ated angler, with gouty foot on chair, who 
bobs for gold-fish in a tub in his own din- 
ing-room, like the familiar man after the 
old painting ; but, like Izaak Walton, he is 



46 



the modest, humble piscator, who trudges 
many a weary but happy mile for his sim- 
ple luncheon of speckled beauties which 
will hardly weigh two to the pound avoir- 
dupois, but who feels that he has well 
earned them before he lands them, and 
who enjoys them all the more because he 
has, perhaps, neglected the mixing of his 
daily bread in the making of his flies or 
the digging of his worms. With great 
delight he studies the winds and the 
clouds, the proper seasons of the year, and 
the proper times of the day, and decides 
whether he shall try a red fly or a dun 
fly or the humble bait that turns. Long 
experience has made him familiar with 
the habits and haunts of the prints he 
fishes for, and well he knows, and dearly 
he loves, the quiet pools, so near the rap- 
id waters of Broadway, the Strand, or the 
Ouai d'Orsay, where the fat ones lurk 
waiting to be caught by the angler who 
knows how to strike them, and how to 
play them, and how to keep them when 
he gets them in. 

There are collectors and collectors, 
however. Some gather prints for the 



47 



sake of the artist who engraved them, 
seeking, for instance, nothing but the 
works of Hollar and Vertue, and every- 
thing of Vertue's and Hollar's that their 
purses will buy. Others collect only for 
the sake of a subject — Bonaparte, Shaks- 
pere, Washington, Mary Stuart, London, 
Steamships, or Cats ; securing every por- 
trait or view of their subject, good, 
bad, indifferent, authentic or ideal, nat- 
ural or artificial, possible, probable, and 
absurd ; while others, collecting to il- 
lustrate a certain book, or books, gath- 
er pictures of every person, or place, 
or thing upon which the text touches. 
There are, also, specialists in style ; col- 
lectors of first impressions, or of artists' 
proofs only ; collectors who will accept 
nothing but line-engravings, mezzotints, 
or etchings, who draw the line at wood- 
cuts ; and there are omnivorous collec- 
tors who draw the line at nothing but a 
photograph, who accept everything that 
is a picture, from a Bartolozzi and a Blake 
down to the commonest stamps on the 
meanest handbills which come from the 
press. These plebeian collections are, in 



48 



certain respects, the most valuable of all. 
They contain the rank-and-file of life, of 
topography, and of architecture, subjects 
which are too humble to attract the atten- 
tion of the great artist, and are only to be 
found embalmed in the columns of some 
illustrated daily, weekly, or monthly jour- 
nal, but which go to make history, and 
are not to be ignored because they are 
mere " process -pictures " of no artistic 
worth. These common cuts, too, often 
preserve the portrait of some person or 
place of no little importance, which by 
accident of time or opportunity have no 
other or no better representation. The 
Extra -illustrators of Ireland's "Records 
of the New York Stage " will look in vain, 
outside of an old number of " Frank Les- 
lie's Lady's Magazine," or of "The Me- 
moirs of Lester Wallack," for a portrait 
of Mrs. Hoey, to make their book com- 
plete ; while inserted in different copies 
of Dr. Francis's " Old New York " are 
newspaper cuts of many interesting his- 
torical old buildings, which would never 
have been reproduced at all if some spe- 
cial artist on the spot had not had the 



49 



rare good-luck to find them next door to 
a fire on the one side of them, or to a mur- 
der done on the other. 

Grangerism is thus defined by the au- 
thor of "The Book Hunter": — "Illus- 
trating a volume consists in inserting in, 
or binding up with it, portraits, land- 
scapes, and other works of art bearing a 
reference to its contents ;" and the Arch- 
Enemy of the sect, parodying Dibdin's 
famous " Recipe for Illustration," contain- 
ed in "The Bibliomania," and itself bor- 
dering on the satirical, proceeded to show 
how a devotee of what he calls the pe- 
culiar practice would naturally go to work 
to illustrate that piece of English verse 
which begins : 

" How doth the little busy bee 
Improve each shining hour." 

Dibdin's example is a paragraph from 
the works of Speed, the historian. But 
as Speed is not always accessible, and as 
Dr. Watts's familiar poem is not alto- 
gether adaptable, the Neophyte for whom 
this particular chapter is written— it is re- 
spectfully inscribed to the Virtuoso who 
is more familiar with the subject than the 

4 



5° 



writer can pretend to be ; — the Neophyte 
will take, for instance, this chapter itself, 
and turning back to the opening para- 
graph he will make, at random, a list of 
names found in the text, including, among 
others, those of James Granger, Thomas 
F. Dibdin, Dr. John W. Francis, Mr. Jo- 
seph N. Ireland, John Hill Burton, James 
Boswell of Auchinleck, Samuel Johnson, 
and Mary Stuart. 

Armed with this list he will at once set 
himself out to procure every portrait of 
these personages he can buy, beg, or ex- 
change, no matter at what period of life 
it is taken, by what class of artist it is 
executed, or to what process of engraving 
it belongs. And this pursuit, if properly 
carried out, he will find a Hberal education 
in itself. 

To begin at the foundation of his sub- 
ject, he will discover, probably, but one 
portrait of Granger, and that not very 
easily. He will see that the first edition 
of Granger's "History of Engraved Brit- 
ish Heads" contained no specimen of the 
Engraved British Head of its author, but 
that a vignette from the hand of C. 



51 



Bretherton is to be found in the edition 
of 1775, 3-nd that this print itself is now 
very scarce. 

Dibdin's picture will not be so far out 
of his reach. He was painted by T. Phil- 
lips, R.A., and engraved by James Thom- 
son for the edition of "The Bibliomania" 
published in 1840. Besides this there are 
several privately engraved plates. Of Dr. 
John W. Francis there are at least four 
portraits within the collector's reach ; the 
familiar head by Julius Hollman serving 
as a frontispiece to " Old New York ;" a 
portrait by the same artist contained in 
" The Knickerbocker Gallery ;" a three- 
quarter length by Herring in " The Na- 
tional Portrait Gallery" (Philadelphia, 
1836) ; and an uncommon print, folio size, 
published by the Appletons. Two por- 
traits of Mr. Joseph N. Ireland, author of 
" The Records of the New York Stage," 
are in existence : one etched by H. B. 
Hall in 1869, and a second engraved by 
J. C. Buttre in 1884. 

Of John Hill Burton there is no like- 
ness in the early edition of " The Book 
Hunter," although a " Nook in the Au- 



5* 



thors' Librar}%"and a full-length portrait 
by W. B. Hole were given in the Edition 
de luxe printed in 18S3. 

If the Laird of Auchinleck — pronounced 
Affleck — had come into the world with- 
out the enthusiasm, the impudence, the 
curiosity, and the untiring want of tact 
which distinguished him, he might have 
gone down unhonored into the dust from 
whence he sprung, and have died entirely 
undrawn except by some Ayrshire limner 
of no repute. But as the friend and biog- 
rapher of Johnson, he became so famous 
that his portrait by Reynolds had been 
engraved no less than ten times when the 
first edition of Croker, and the eleventh 
of Boswell, appeared in 1831 ; and how 
often it has been copied since no man can 
tell. This picture by Sir Joshua, the full- 
length portrait by George Langton, an 
engraving of which, by E. Finden, was 
published by Murray in 1835, and the gro- 
tesque head in profile by Lawrence, are 
the best known portraits that have come 
down to us. 

The print bearing the legend, " James 
Boswell, in the Dress of an Armed Cor- 



53 



sican Chief, as he appeared at Shakspere's 
Jubilee at Stratford-on-Avon, September, 
1769," is curious and rare, and was, no 
doubt, originally published with his con- 
currence. It speaks for itself, and for 
Boswell ! 

Concerning the portraits of Dr. John- 
son alone, many pages might be written. 
His face is as familiar to-day as is that of 
Bonaparte, Shakspere, or Mary Queen 
of Scots. In one private collection of 
Johnson there are one hundred and fifty- 
three prints, no two of which are alike ; 
and this collection is known to be incom- 
plete. When the Neophyte comes to this 
name on his list he will be at a loss where 
to begin and how soon to stop. He will 
certainly be tempted to gather as many 
as his purse will buy. 

The earliest authentic portrait of the 
great lexicographer is a miniature, the 
painter of which is unknown. It belonged 
to Mrs. Johnson, and was first engraved in 
1 83 1 by Finden, for the earliest edtion of 
Croker. 

In 1756 Sir Joshua Reynolds painted 
Johnson in three-quarter length, seated 



54 



in an arm-chair at a table, and with pen 
in hand. This has been repeatedly en- 
graved, although the most rare prints are 
the work of J. Heath (quarto), for the 
first edition of Boswell, 1791, and that of 
J. Baker (octavo) for the edition of 1793. 
Another portrait by Reynolds was with- 
out a wig and with the hands raised. It 
was executed about 1770, and went into 
the collection of the Duke of Sutherland. 
A third by the same artist bears date 1773. 
It has the left hand on the waistcoat but- 
ton, and was painted for Rennet Langton. 
In 1778 Reynolds painted his friend again, 
this time " a kit-kat," and for Mr. Malone. 
It represents its subject as near-sighted 
and holding a book close to the eyes, a 
portrait which Johnson resented as an 
unfriendly act on the part of the painter 
in handing down to posterity the inflic- 
tions and infirmities of the original. 
These have all been painted in replica; 
and more than once, and scores of times, 
have they been engraved. Sir Joshua's 
hypothetical " portrait " of Johnson as he 
was supposed to have looked when a 
child of two years, preternaturally heavy 



55 



in head, and already with dehberation and 
pedantic care engraven on his front, is 
described by Mr. Tom Taylor in his " Life 
of Reynolds " as beautiful in color and in 
fine preservation. 

Johnson was painted by Barry — full 
face and finished only as far as the shoul- 
ders — about 1 78 1 . Opie's portrait, a three- 
quarter face turned to the left, was en- 
graved by J. Heath for the folio dictionary 
of 1786. Miss Reynolds, a niece of Sir 
Joshua, painted a miniature on ivory, as 
well as a three-quarter length, life-size 
portrait on canvas, which latter her sitter 
himself described as "Johnson's grimly 
ghost." Of the last portrait, by Trotter, 
Johnson said: "Well, thou art an ugly 
fellow ! But still I believe thou art like 
the original !" 

Besides all these, mentioned briefly 
above, the collector will find prints of John- 
son in all conditions, of all sizes, and by 
engravers good and bad, after original por- 
traits by Northcote, Zoffany, Humphrey, 
Harding, and others, as well as engrav- 
ings of the bust by Nollekens, and the 
statue by Bacon in St. Paul's Cathedral. 



56 



Here, taken almost at random, are but a 
very few examples of the pictures the 
Extra -illustrator will hunt for, and per- 
haps find, in Extra-illustrating a few stray 
pages upon Extra-illustration. But they 
will whet his appetite for more. He will 
have spent a few dollars — well invested 
— and many happy days in making his 
collection ; and he will spend happy nights 
in arranging and counting and admiring 
it. Those portraits which have margins 
too large he will cut down to fit, those 
which are too small he will have " backed " 
and " inlaid" by Trent, Lawrence, or Tocdt- 
berg, or if he be an artist as well as an en- 
thusiast, like Mr. Moreau, he will inlay 
his own prints. 

When these are bound in with the text, 
and with, perhaps, a few autographs add- 
ed, the Grangerite has made for himself 
an absolutely unique book, into which he 
has put so much of himself that his Extra- 
illustrated copy becomes part of himself, 
and a joy to him forever. And he blesses 
himself that he has a hobby; while he 
blesses Granger for giving his hobby a 
reason and a name. 



ON THE PORTRAITS OF MARY 
QUEEN OF SCOTS 



I 



CHAPTER III 

ON THE PORTRAITS OF MARY QUEEN 
OF SCOTS 




HE question of the personal 
appearance of the last Queen 
of the Scots is a matter of 
as much uncertainty to-day 
as is the greater question of 
her moral character. Scores of volumes 
have been written to prove her virtue or 
to proclaim her infamy, and hundreds of 
artists have endeavored to picture the 
face, a glimpse of which, it was said, 
would move even her enemies to forget 
her follies and forgive her faults. That 
she was the most beautiful princess, if not 
the most beautiful woman, of her time, 
tradition and history have declared for 
three hundred years ; but wherein lay her 
loveliness of person, or how far, as a wom- 
an, she was worthy of respect, neither 



6o 



history nor art can positively assert. The 
subject of her portraiture, therefore, merits 
a chapter to itself. 

Horace Walpole, author of " Anecdotes 
of Painting," and no mean authority upon 
the subject, to which he had given close 
attention, said in a letter to Sir Joseph 
Banks, first published in George Chal- 
mers's " Life of Mary Queen of Scots " 
(1822), that he could never ascertain the 
authenticity and originality of any of the 
so-called portraits of her, except that one 
which was in the possession of the Earl 
of Morton. " It agrees," he wrote, " with 
the figure on the tomb at Westminster; 
in both the nose rises a little towards the 
top, bends rather inward at the bottom, 
but it is true that the profile on her medal 
is rather full, too. Yet I should think 
that Lord Morton's portrait and the tomb 
are most to be depended on." 

The picture known as the " Morton 
Portrait " was painted, according to gen- 
erally accepted tradition, by Mary's own 
order in 1 567, when the unfortunate Queen 
was twenty-five years of age, and during 
the first year of her confinement at Loch 



6i 



Leven. It is on a panel, is of life-size, 
and has been attributed to Lucas de 
Heere. The present Earl of Morton is 
descended from Sir William Douglas, 
Laird of Loch Leven, and the elder brother 
of George Douglas, to whom Mary is said 
to have presented the picture, because of 
his assistance in effecting her escape from 
the castle. The fact that it has been in 
the possession of this family for upward 
of three centuries is its strongest claim 
to originality. It has frequently been 
engraved. 

The full-length, life-size, recumbent 
efhgy in alabaster on the tomb in West- 
minster Abbey was placed there upon the 
removal of the remains of Mary from 
Peterborough in 1612. Its costume re- 
sembles in many respects that of the 
Morton portrait, by which perhaps it was 
suggested. The name of the designer of 
this monument has never been clearly 
ascertained, although it would appear 
from certain of the records kept during 
the reign of the first Stuart king of Eng- 
land that " Cornelius Cure, Master-Mason 
to his Highness's Works," did receive, 



62 



dnrinpj the years 1606 and 1607, various 
sums of money " for the framing, making, 
erecting, and finishing of a tomb for Queen 
Mary, late Queen of Scotland . . . accord- 
ing to a Plot thereof drawn "; and that 
" William Cure, his Majesty's Master- 
Mason, son and executor under Cornelius 
Cure," was paid other various sums in 
1610, and again in 161 3. for " making the 
Tomb to his Majesty's Dearest Mother." 
From these it would appear that the 
monument was begun six years before, 
and finished one year after, the final inter- 
ment, in 161 2. John de Critz, mentioned 
by Meres in his " Wit's Commonwealth " 
(1598), as "famous for his painting," is 
generally believed to have been the archi- 
tect of the tomb to Elizabeth in the ad- 
joining chapel ; and as they are similar 
in design and of about the same date, it 
is not improbable that he was the author 
of the " Plot thereof drawn " for the tomb 
to Mary. The figure, at all events, was 
executed less than a quarter of a century 
after Mary's death, and when there must 
have been many persons living in Great 
Britain who remembered her. Its cor- 



63 



rectness as a portrait does not seem to 
have been questioned then, and there is 
every reason to believe, with Walpole, 
that it is one of the best Hkenesses of her 
which has been handed down to us. 

Without doubt the first attempt at por- 
traiture of the Queen of Scots was made 
in her earhest infancy, for her Httle face 
was engraved upon the half-pennies issued 
from the Royal Scottish Mint at the time 
of her coronation in 1543, and when she 
was but nine months old, A number of 
these small coins are still preserved, and 
it is said that the name " bawbee," or baby, 
was originally given to that denomination 
of money because of its bearing the image 
and superscription of the Baby Queen. 
As a likeness, of course, this is of little 
value. Nor can much more credit be 
attached to the portrait of the bright, 
piquant little girl in the collection of Lord 
Napier, notwithstanding the fact that it 
bears a memorandum in the handwriting 
of Francis, seventh Lord Napier, dated 
1790, to the effect that "this picture of 
Mary Queen of Scots, supposed to have 
been painted when she was about twelve 



64 



years of age. has ever been considered to 
be an original picture, and has been in the 
possession of the Napier family for many 
generations." It is on canvas, two feet 
three inches high, one foot ten inches 
wide ; the complexion is fair, the hair 
light brown, the roses in the head-dress 
are crimson, and the gown is red, with 
white stripes. It resembles so strongly 
in face and costume, however, a pc^rtrait 
in the collection of the Karl of r)cnl)igh, 
which is known to be that of an Infanta 
of Spain, who lived many years after 
Mary's time, and who was even suggested 
as a proper wife for her grandson, Charles 
I., that there can be little ground for the 
belief that it was intended for the Queen 
of Scots at all. 

The earliest painted portraits of Mary 
are probably those executed in France be- 
fore her marriage to the Dauphin in 1558, 
for it is an established fact that Frangois 
Clouet, otherwise Jchannet or Janet, who 
was court painter successively to Francis 
I.. Henry II., Francis II., Charles IX., and 
Henry III., made a portrait of her about 
the year 1555. which was sent to the Queen- 



65 



Regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise, but of 
which there is no trace now. In the col- 
lection of " Drawings of the Principal 
Personages of the Court of Henry II. of 
France," purchased by the Earl of Carlisle 
in Florence about an hundred years ago, 
and now at Castle Howard, there is a por- 
trait of Mary ascribed to Janet, and, per- 
haps, the first sketch of the picture sent 
to her mother. It resembles the portrait 
in colored crayons in the library of St. 
Genevieve, in Paris, which has been re- 
produced by engraving in P. G. J. Neil's 
" Portraits des Personages Frangais," al- 
though they both suggest a woman of 
twenty or more, rather than a child of 
thirteen, and neither of them resembles 
in any way the subject of the Napier por- 
trait described above. In the crayon 
drawing the eyes and hair are light brown. 
Janet is known to have painted another 
portrait of Mary during her first widow- 
hood, and when she was known as " La 
Reine Blaiiche,'' and the picture now at 
Hampton Court is believed to be the 
original of this. It is faded, and has 
every appearance of having been retouch- 

5 



66 



ed and restored. It certainly belonged 
to Charles I., for it bears his monogram, 
" C. R.," surmounted by a crown, and has 
attached to it a note by the keeper of the 
king's pictures testifying that " it is Queen 
Marye of Scotland, appointed by His Ma- 
jesty for the Cabinet Room, 1631. By 
Janet." Its history before it came into 
the possession of Charles has never been 
traced to the satisfaction of the antiqua- 
ries. The eyes are dark brown, the wid- 
ow's white cap pressing on the forehead 
is opened- at the sides to show the dark 
brown hair and joins a veil which passes 
around the cheeks and conceals the ears. 
The face is that of a decidedly elderly 
woman ; and the expression is very sad. 
If by Janet, and of Mary, it could only 
have been painted when the Queen was in 
her nineteenth or twentieth year. An old 
copy of it is in the National Portrait Gal- 
lery at South Kensington, whence it was 
taken from the British Museum some 
years ago ; and several pictures of the 
same type are to be found at Versailles 
and elsewhere. 

Patrick Fraser-Tytler, the historian of 



67 



Scotland, published in 1845, for private 
circulation only, a monograph in which 
he attempted to prove that the picture 
now known as the " Fraser-Tytler Por- 
trait " was the identical likeness painted 
in 1560 shortly before the death of Fran- 
cis II., and sent by Mary, through Lord 
Seton, to Elizabeth. It belonged to an 
artist named Stewart, was bought by Fra- 
ser-Tytler from a dealer, and is now the 
property of the trustees of South Kensing- 
ton. It is three feet one and a half inches 
long, and two feet three inches wide. The 
painter is unknown, although it has been 
ascribed to Zuccaro, who was only a lad 
during Mary's residence at the French 
court, and who did not go to Paris until 
the reign of Charles IX., ten or twelve 
years after Mary's return to Scotland. It 
is hardly probable that she sat to Zuccaro 
at any time. His only visit to England 
was during her long captivity, and when 
she was kept under the closest surveil- 
lance. Walpole believed that Zuccaro 
could never have seen her, and Labanof 
included him in a long list of artists who 
painted purely imaginative portraits of 



68 



her, or who, for various reasons, could 
never have been the authors of the pict- 
ures of her which have since been attrib- 
uted to them. The portrait of Mary and 
James VI., on one canvas, ascribed to 
Zuccaro, now in the Drapers' Hall, Lon- 
don, must of necessity be false as an his- 
torical if not as an artistic work ; for the 
little prince, who was taken from his 
mother before he was a year old, never 
to see her again, is represented as a lad 
of five or six, standing by his mother's 
side. Curious stories are told of this 
painting, and of the manner of its com- 
ing into the f>ossession of its present 
owners. There is a tradition that it was 
thrown over the walls of the Drapers' 
Garden for safety during the great fire 
by persons now unknown, and never re- 
claimed ; another that Sir Anthony Ba- 
bington left it with the Drapers' Com- 
pany for safe-keeping, and could not get 
it back ; still another that it was stolen 
from some of the royal palaces by Sir 
William Boreman in the reign of Charles 
II.; and it is even insinuated that it is a 
portrait of Lady Dulcibella Boreman, Sir 



69 



William's wife. It was cleaned at the in- 
stigation of Mr. Alderman Boydell tow- 
ards the close of the last century, and it 
has been engraved by Bartolozzi. 

Another portrait of Mary with a ro- 
mantic history is that which was be- 
queathed by Elizabeth Curie, an attend- 
ant and faithful friend of the Queen, to 
the Scot's college at Douai, where it re- 
mained until the end of the French Rev- 
olution, During the Reign of Terror it 
was concealed by the priests of the col- 
lege in the flue of a disused chimney, and 
it lay there, forgotten, for more than 
twenty years. It hung for some time after 
that on the walls of the Scottish Benedic- 
tine Convent at Paris, but in 1830 it was 
carried to the Roman Catholic estab- 
lishment at Blair, near Aberdeen, where 
Agnes Strickland savv^ it, accepted its au- 
thenticity, and had it engraved as a fron- 
tispiece for one of her published works. 
The artist, as usual, is unknown, although 
it has been attributed, with slight author- 
ity, to Amyas Carwood, whose name ap- 
pears upon the painting of the decapitat- 
ed head of Mary which belonged to Sir 



70 



Walter Scott, and with which all visitors 
to Abbotsford are familiar. That the 
Curie portrait was a posthumous work 
there can be no question, as the scene of 
the execution is introduced in the back- 
ground. A poor copy of it in her Maj- 
esty's collection at Windsor, is said by 
the difTerent authorities to have been 
made in the reign of Charles I., of James 
II., and even as late as that of George III. 
Barbara and Elizabeth Curie were devoted 
servants of the Queen, and were present at 
the last scene of all at Fotheringay, in 1 587. 
They escaped to the Continent with Gil- 
bert Curie, the brother of Elizabeth and 
husband of Barbara, carrying the portrait 
with them, or, perhaps, painting it from 
memory during their exile. On the death 
of the last survivor of them it was left, as 
has been shown above, to the college at 
Douai. Their bodies were buried in the 
south transept of the church at Antwerp, 
which is dedicated to the patron saint of 
Scotland ; and above the mural tablet 
erected to their memory, and supported 
by two carved angels, is a portrait of their 
Queen, copied — the head and bust only — 



from the original work which they so 
dearly prized. 

Still another picture of the Scottish 
Queen, with a strange, eventful history, is 
that which is known as the " Oxford Por- 
trait " in the Bodleian Library. Sir Da- 
vid Wilkie discovered that there were two 
portraits of the same person — although 
unlike in costume and not very like in 
face — upon the same canvas ; and after 
the outer picture had been carefully cop- 
ied it was removed, leaving the portrait 
as the visitor to Oxford sees it to-day. 
The reason for painting this second pict- 
ure over the first, and the period or the 
artist of either picture, no man now can 
tell. 

The portrait of Queen Mary most fa- 
miliar to the world, because most fre- 
quently reproduced, and upon which the 
popular idea of her personal appearance 
is based, is that known as the " Ork- 
ney Portrait," belonging to the Duke 
of Sutherland. Its painter is also un- 
known. The nearly effaced date, 1556, 
and the name Farini, or Furini, are said 
to be visible upon it ; but it bears every 



72 



evidence of belnu^ much more modern 
than the middle of the sixteenth century. 
It is said to have belonged to Robert 
Stuart, one of the many natural sons of 
James V. who fretted Mary's reign, and 
who was created Earl of Orkney by James 
VI. How this picture came into his pos- 
session tradition does not say. A well- 
known copy of it by Watson Gordon 
hangs in Oueen Mary's room in the Cas- 
tle of Edinburgh. 

An interesting miniature of the Scottish 
Queen is now in America, As it has never 
been engraved or publicly exhibited, it is 
little known to collectors. It represents 
her at half length. The dress is black, 
trimmed around the neck, the arms, and 
upon the bosom with eider-down. Be- 
tween the large ruff of the down about 
her neck, and the neck itself, is a fine, up- 
right collar of stiff lace. On the head, 
and falling back over the neck, is a black 
velvet coif. The hair is what is called 
"Titian gold." The background of the 
picture is dark blue, and contains the le- 
gend, " A/ar /a. Rt'^i'na. Scotontm." In 
the case of polished wood which holds it 



73 



is a gold plate with the following inscrip- 
tion : " This original portrait of Queen 
Mary Stuart is an heirloom in the family 
of the Setons of Parbroath — now of New 
York — into whose possession it came 
through their ancestor, David Seton of 
Parbroath, who was Comptroller of the 
Scottish Revenue from 1589 to 1595, and 
a loyal adherent of his unfortunate Sov- 
ereign. It was brought to America in 1 763 
by William Seton, Esquire, representative 
of the Parbroath branch of the ancient 
and illustrious family of the forfeited Earls 
of Winton." There is a tradition that this 
picture was the gift of the Queen to her 
faithful servant, David Seton, who, al- 
though a member of the Kirk of Scot- 
land, was never counted among her per- 
sonal foes. A copy of it was presented by 
the late William Seton in 1855 to Prince 
Labanof, who believed it to be from life, 
and surmised that it was taken during 
her captivity. The face is beautiful but 
no longer young. 

Of the very many other existing por- 
traits of Mary, or of their claims to au- 
thenticity, it is hardly possible or neces- 



74 



sary to speak here. Nearly fifty paintings 
of all sizes, generally believed to be 
"originals" by their owners, were exhib- 
ited at Peterborough, at the Tercentenary 
of Queen Mary's death, in 1887, and hun- 
dreds of engraved portraits, no two of 
which are exactly alike, are in the differ- 
ent private collections on both sides of 
the Atlantic, nearly all of which may be 
marked " doubtful." Vertue himself con- 
fessed that he did not believe "the fine 
head in a black hat, by Isaac Oliver, in 
the king's collection," which he engraved, 
to be a portrait of Mary, and he also 
questioned the authenticity of the pict- 
ure known as the " Carleton Portrait," 
which he engraved for Lord Burleigh. 
Holbein died before he could possibly 
have painted Mary; Vandyck was not 
born until twelve years after her execu- 
tion ; Paris Bordone may have seen her, 
although there is no certainty of his hav- 
ing been in Paris after the reign of Francis 
I.; Zuccaro probably did not paint her, 
and yet to all of these artists " original " 
portraits are positively ascribed. 

It is a remarkable fact that the more 



75 



beautiful is the face which is painted or 
engraved the less reason is there for be- 
lieving it to be the face of Mary. A glance 
at the fullest collection of " Mariana," in 
which are prints good and bad, authentic, 
posthumous, apocryphal, ancient, and 
modern, will convince the observer that 
no woman, no matter how varied her ex- 
pression, could possibly have looked like 
them all. The coins and medals struck 
during her lifetime to commemorate in- 
teresting events in her career, and still in 
existence in France and in Great Britain, 
so far as that style of portraiture is to be 
depended upon, may give a better and 
more reliable idea of her face in profile 
than any of the paintings which vary so 
much in expression and in color. Her 
head is to be found upon Scottish silver 
coins of 1553 and 1561, and upon a Scot- 
tish gold coin of 1555. There is a cast of 
a medallion at South Kensington, by Ja- 
copo Primevra, which is very clear ; and 
the medals containing her head and that 
of the Dauphin, which were struck in honor 
of their marriage, are still to be seen in 
their original state at Versailles and in 



76 



Other French galleries ; but how correct 
any of these may be as portraits, it is not 
possible now to say. 

After careful inspection of all the so- 
called " original portraits " of Mary Stuart, 
and after conscientious reading of much 
of the voluminous literature, contempo- 
raneous and otherwise, in which she fig- 
ures, it is not possible to accept any pict- 
ure of her, either by painter or by writer, 
as absolutely correct. While the lock of 
her hair, found in a cabinet which was 
inherited by Charles I. from his father 
and is carefully preserved by the present 
Queen, " is of the loveliest golden hue 
and very fine," Nicholas Whyte, Bur- 
Icighs emissary, wrote to his chief in 1 569, 
on the strength of information rcceiv'cd 
from Mary's attendants, that her hair was 
"black or almost so." In the " Fraser- 
Tytler Portrait " the face is pale, the eye- 
brows of a pale yellow tint, the hair yellow 
rather than brown, and the eyes blue. In 
the picture supposed to have been pre- 
sented by Mary to the Earl of Cassillis, 
one of the Scottish commissioners sent to 
act as a witness at her marriage to the 



77 



Dauphin, the hair is of a rich chestnut 
tint, almost black, the eyes and eyebrows 
are dark, and the complexion is that of a 
delicate brunette. In a miniature, dated 
1579, with the monogram " M. R." in the 
corner, and sold in the Neville Holt col- 
lection in 1848 as " a reliable, original por- 
trait of Mary Stuart," the hair is brown 
and the eyes gray. Janet painted her 
with light brown eyes and hair. Melville, 
in comparing the rival queens, said that 
Elizabeth's hair was more red than yel- 
low, while Mary's was " light auburn, her 
eyes of chestnut color." Winkfield, an eye- 
witness of Mary's execution, described her 
eyes as hazel. Ledyard, in one of his 
poems, spoke of her yeiix tm pen brunets ; 
and they all seem, to agree that she had 
a slight but perceptible squint. 

That Mary wore false hair, and of many 
different colors, there is every reason to 
believe. Elizabeth is known to have had 
a collection of eighty wigs, and her dear 
cousin, with the unusual advantages of so 
many seasons in Paris, is not likely to 
have been far behind her. Among the 
statements of the accounts of her personal 



78 



expenditure are numerous items of per- 
rifgitcs (iiu-/ic7>iiix,2i\\d. Sir Francis Knollis, 
writing to Burleigh of the ever faithful 
" Mistress Mary Seton, the finest busker, 
that is to say the finest dresser of a wom- 
an's head of hair that is to be seen in any 
country," said. " And among the prett}'- 
devices she did set such a curled hair 
u[)on the Queen, that was said to be pere- 
wyke that shewed very delicately. And 
every other day she hath a new device of 
head-dressing, without any cost, and yet 
setting forth a woman gaylie well." This 
variety and eccentricity of coilTure natu- 
rally adds to the confusion, and makes 
greater the dilTiculty in identifying posi- 
tively any of the portraits or descriptions 
of Mary. Historians say that her mother 
was tall and beautiful, that her father was 
dignified, having a fair complexion and 
light hair ; and other and contempora- 
neous historians say that she inherited 
most of the characteristics of her parents, 
" being about the ordinary size, with fair 
complexion and Grecian features, and a 
nose somewhat longer than a painter 
would care to perpetuate ; . . . her face 



79 



was oval, her forehead high and fine." 
Froude, in later days, pictures her as grace- 
ful alike in person and in intellect, and as 
possessing that peculiar beauty in which 
the form is lost in the expression, and 
which every painter has represented dif- 
ferently ; and Brantome, one of the an- 
cient chroniclers, summing it all up in one 
fine sentence, described her at her mar- 
riage to the Dauphin as being "more beau- 
teous and charming than a celestial god- 
dess." 

" An angel is like you, Kate ; and you 
are like an angel," was a very pretty 
speech for Shakspere's Henry V. to make 
to the French king's daughter, but it gives 
us of to-day no better notion of Kath- 
erine's beauty than do all the composite 
portraits, by painters and historians, of 
the wondrous loveliness of the Queen of 
the Scots. 



ON SOME PORTRAIT INSCRIP- 
TIONS 



CHAPTER IV 



ON SOME PORTRAIT INSCRIPTIONS 




_^EXT to the familiar lines, 
beginning, "Good Frend for 
Jesu's Sake Forbear," carved 
upon the stone which covers 
the supposed grave of Shaks- 
pere, in the chancel of the church at 
Stratford, no verses of any kind relating 
to Shakspere are more familiar to the 
general reader of English literature than 
are those written by Ben Jonson.and pre- 
fixed to the famous Droeshout portrait of 
Shakspere, contained in the Four Folios 
of his Plays : 



" This Figure, that thou here seest put, 
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut ; 

Wherein tlie Grauer had a strife 
With Nature, to out-doo the life : 

O, could he but have drawne his wit 
As well in brasse, as he hath hit 



84 



His face ; the Print would then surpasse 
All, that was ever writ in brasse. 

But, since he cannot, Reader, looke 
Not on his Picture, but his Booke. 

"B. I." 

This poetical effusion has served to 
establish in a great many minds, and de- 
spite all sorts of contradictory statements, 
the conviction that Shakspere lived, and 
had a being, and even that he wrote, and 
was portrayed by limners; and it seems 
to prove that Jonson knew him, and be- 
lieved in him, and that Jonson believed, 
as well, in the Droeshout portrait. It is 
unquestionably one of the most important 
of the Portrait Inscriptions which have 
come down to us from the seventeenth 
century; but that it is only one of very 
many similar dedicatory stanzas, is prob- 
ably a fact of which the general read- 
er is not aware. A number of these, 
including one to Jonson himself, were 
seen in the Exhibition of Engraved Por- 
traits made by the members of the Grolier 
Club of New York in December, 1891 ; 
and in the collection of Mr. Beverly 
Chew — kindly placed at the disposal of 
the writer of this chapter — are some two 



8s 



hundred examples of this species of Eng- 
lish verse, all of them curious and some 
of them rare, while a few, signed by their 
authors, are nowhere to be found among 
the fugitive pieces in these authors' col- 
lected works. 

Concerning the Droeshout portrait of 
Shakspere innumerable papers, pamph- 
lets, and even books, have been written. 
It is found in all sorts of conditions or 
"states," no two of which are absolutely 
alike ; and the first " state " is, naturally, 
the best. Of this only one example is 
known to exist, a proof, which belonged 
to Mr, Halliwell-Phillips. It was on the 
exceedingly rare title-page printed before 
the word "coppi'cs" was corrected to the 
single " p " of the rare First Folio ; and 
all later impressions are believed to have 
been printed from a re-touched plate. 

The name Droeshout was spelled by 
his contemporaries, and perhaps by him- 
self, in a number of ways — Droeshout, 
Droshaut, Drossaert, Drussoit, etc. 

The Droeshouts were a Netherlandish 
family of artists who settled in England 
during the last quarter of the sixteenth 



86 



ccntur}^ The first of the name of whom 
there is any record was " Jolin, a painter." 
Michael, who is believed to have been a 
son of John, is described "as a fjraver in 
copper, which he learned in Brussels." 
Michael's son, Martin, was baptized in 
the Dutch Church, Austin Friars, April 
26, 1 601, fifteen years before Shakspere's 
death. Another Martin, probably an un- 
cle, fij^urcs in the records of the same 
church as "a painter, of Brabant." The 
younger Martin was admitted a member 
of the church in 1624, a year after the 
publication of the First Folio; and he is, 
in all probability, the author of the Shak- 
spere portrait. His name also appears 
upon still existing engraved heads of 
James, Marquis of Hamilton, who died in 
1625; George V^illiers. Duke of Bucking- 
ham, assassinated in 1628; Sir Thomas 
Overbury (1581-1613); Dr. John Donne, 
engraved for " Death's Duell," published 
in London in 1632-33; George Chapman 
(1 557-1634). etc. 

The Drocshout print was [)laced upon 
the title-page of the First FcjHo, between 
the words of the actual title and the 



8? 



names of the printers — " Isaac laggard, 
and Ed, Blount, 1623 " ; and it bears the 
signature of the engraver in full. Jonson's 
lines were on the leaf facing the title- 
page, as was not infrequently the custom 
in those daj^s. In the second issue of 
the Third Folio, 1664, the Droeshout print 
was removed from the title-page to make 
room for the enumeration of the sev^n 
doubtful plays, and was placed over Jon- 
son's lines, so as to face the title, like the 
frontispieces of the present time. 

Mr. George Scharf, Curator of the 
National Portrait Gallery in London, and 
a recognized authority upon the subject, 
in a long and exhaustive article upon 
"The Principal Portraits of Shakspere," 
contributed to hfotcs and Queries, for April 
23, 1864 — Shakspere's birthday — ex- 
presses the opinion that the earliest im- 
pressions of the Droeshout print afford a 
very satisfactory indication of the indi- 
vidual appearance of the man, that the 
style of wearing the hair and the smooth, 
round cheeks accord with the monu- 
mental bust; and that the engraving, very 
probably, represents the subject as he 



appeared towards the close of his life. 
The plate is sharp and coarse, he con- 
tinues, but there is very little to censure 
with respect to the actual drawing of the 
features; and he believes that Droeshout 
worked from a good original — some lim- 
ning or crayon drawing, which having 
served its purpose became neglected, and 
is now lost. Alas, and alas, that this 
original limning — if it ever existed — exists 
no longer ! 

Malone, on the other liaiul, said that 
" tiierc is no way of accounting for the 
great dillerence [in artistic skill] between 
the print [of Droeshout's Shakspere] and 
his spirited portraits of [Gen. William] 
Fairfax and Bishop Ilowson, but by sup- 
posing that tlie picture of Shakspere from 
which he copied it was a very coarse 
performance." 

While Mr. Scharf thinks tiiat the print 
cxhii)its Shakspere in the ordinary gar- 
ments of a priv^ate gentleman of the peri- 
od, other writers profess to believe that it 
represents him in the character of Old 
Knowcll, in Jonson's " Every Man in His 
Humor," which tradition says Shakspere 



acted at the original production of the 
comedy in 1598; and this, perhaps, may 
account for the Laureate's enthusiastic 
indorsement of the portrait of the Player. 
Mr. Scharf thinks, too, that the Droe- 
shout head and stiff collar were followed 
by William Marshall in his small oval 
portrait of Shakspere which was prefixed 
to the 1640 edition of "The Poems." The 
body- dress and close-fitting sleeve are 
similar in point of construction ; and 
while the embroidery is omitted alto- 
gether, the exact number of buttons is 
reproduced ; the head, however, is look- 
ing the other way, the background is 
light, and the left hand holds a sprig of 
laurel. This portrait has also an inscrip- 
tion, to wit : 

" This Shadowe is renowned Shakespear's, Soule of 

th' age, 
The applause, delight, the wonder of the Stage, 
Nature herself, was proud of his designes. 
And joy'd to weare the dressing of his lines, 
The learned will Confess, his works are such, 
As neither man nor Muse can prayse to much. 
Forever live thy fame, the world to tell 
Thy like, no age shall ever paralell." 

William Marshall engraved chiefly for 



r)0 



the booksellers, and he excelled in por- 
traits. Some twenty-five examples of his 
work were in the Grolier Exhibition, in- 
cluding heads of Michael Drayton, 1637 ; 
Sir Thomas More, 1639; Sir Francis Ba- 
con, with eight lines in Latin, 1640; Ben 
Jonson, 1640; James Shirley, with four 
Latin lines, 1646; and William Camden, 
1652. Marshall was emphatically the 
medium for the expression of Portrait 
Inscriptions in English, and at this same 
Grolier Exhibition there were no less than 
six specimens of his work in that direc- 
tion. Besides this inscription to Shaks- 
perc, there were Walton's lines to Doc- 
tor Donne, 1635; four lines to Francis 
Ouarlcs. 1645; eight lines to Sir John 
Suckling. 1646; nine lines to John Fletch- 
er, 1647; eight lines to Herrick, 1648; and 
Thomas May's lines to John Quarles, 
1648. 

Another evident copy of the Droe- 
shout head is to be found in the 1655 
edition of " Lucrece." It is the work of 
William Faithorne the elder, who was 
born in 161 6 — the year of Shakspere's 
death. It contains two lines of verse, but 



9' 



they refer to Lucrece and Tarquin, not to 
Shakspere himself. 

Faithorne was a prolific engraver. He 
was a pupil of Hollar in England, and of 
Nanteuil in France ; and he was well- 
known to Evelyn and Pepys, and to all 
the art-lovers of his day. Walpole said : 
" Faithorne now set up in a new shop at 
the Sign of the Ship, next to the Drake, 
opposite to the Palsgrave's Head, without 
Temple Bar, where he not only followed 
his art, but sold Italian, Dutch, and Eng- 
lish prints, and worked for booksellers." 
Pepys wrote in his Diary, November 7, 
1666 : " Called at Faythorne's,to buy some 
prints for my wife to draw by this winter, 
and here did see my Lady Castlemaine's 
picture done by him from Lilly's, in red 
chalke and other colours, by which he 
hath cut it in copper, to be printed "; and 
on December ist of the same year, the 
Diarist added : " By coach home, in the 
evening, calling at Faythorne's, buying 
three of my Lady Castlemaine's heads, 
printed this day, which indeed is, as to the 
head, I think, a very fine picture, and like 
her." 



92 



Thomas Flatman (1633-1688), who is 
described as having been skilled in paint- 
ing, poetry, and law, paid to Faithorne, in 
the 1662 edition of Faithorne's " Book of 
Drawing, Etching and Graving," the fol- 
lowing poetic tribute : 

"A 'Faiihorjie ScidpsW is a charm can save 
From dull oblivion and a gaping grave." 

Although Flatman is generally forgot- 
ten at the present day, there are evidences 
that he was not entirely unknown to 
Alexander Pope a century and a half ago. 
The first edition of Flatman's Poems ap- 
peared in 1674, and contained the follow- 
ing lines : 

" When on my sick-bed I languish. 
Full of sorrow, full of anguish, 
Fainting, gasping, trembling, crj'ing, 
Panting, groaning, speechless, dying. 

Methinks I hear some gentle spirit say 
Be not fearful, come away." 

In the month of December, 1712, Mr. 
Pope wrote to Steele : " I do not send you 
word I will do, but have already done, 
the thing you desire of me. You have 



93 



it (as Cowley calls it) just warm from the 
brain. It came to me the first moment 
I waked this morning; yet you will see it 
was not so absolutely inspiration but that 
I had in my head not only the verses of 
Adrian, but the fine fragment of Sappho." 
The thing Steele desired of him was " an 
Ode as of a cheerful dying spirit," and the 
result, in part, is here set down : — 

" Vital spark of Heavenly flame, 
Quit O quit this mortal frame ; 
Trembling, hoping lingering, flying — 
Oh! the pain, tlie bliss of dying. 

Hark they whisper, Angels say — 
Sister Spirit come away." 

What is known as " the deadly parallel " 
will prove that Pope's inspiration came 
rather from Flatman than from the orig- 
inal Sappho or from anybody else ; and 
that the thing went to Steele not only 
warm from the brain of its doer, but 
warmed over! 

Rare prints bearing the legend " Faz- 
thorne Sculpsi't" — to return to the subject 
of portraits — have helped save from dull 
oblivion the counterfeit presentments of 



94 



many better persons than Samuel Pepys's 
Lady Castlemaine ; including Thomas Kil- 
ligrew, 1644; Richard Hooker, 1662 ; Jere- 
my Taylor, 1663; John Milton, 1670; and 
Sir William Davenant, 1672-73. 

From Jonson's inscription upon the 
portrait of Shakspere we turn, naturally, 
to the inscription under the portrait of 
Jonson, which was engraved by Robert 
Vaughan. It contains eight lines in Lat- 
in, and two in English, the latter reading 
as follows : 

"O could there be an art found out that might 
Produce his shape soe lively as to write." 

In its first state, with the words "Are to 
be sould by William Peake," Mr. Chew 
believes that it was issued as a print. The 
second state was prefixed to the " Works," 
London, 1640, tiiree years after Jonson 
received from King Charles L eighteen 
inches of square ground in Westminster 
Abbey, and was left standing in his lim- 
ited estate, in a grave " dug not far from 
Drayton's.' 

The lines on the Vaughan portrait are 
signed Ab, Holl. 



95 



•* Ab. Holl " has been supposed to have 
been Abraham Holland, an intimate of 
Drayton whom he called his " Honest 
Father," and a friend of John Davies, of 
Hereford, who signed the inscription to 
the portrait of Captain John Smith, de- 
scribed below. Holland was the author 
of "A Resolution Against Death " and of 
a poem upon the Plague of 1625. He 
died, himself, despite his Resolution, in 
1626; and, naturally, he could not have 
written the lines placed under a posthu- 
mous portrait of Jonson, who lived until 

1637. 

Bryan, who gives but few dates, says 

thaf'Vaughan died towards 1667." His 
latest plate, according to Horace Walpole, 
was executed in 1665. Vaughan's por- 
traits are valued less for their merit as 
works of art than for the fame of their 
subjects. His print of Sir Walter Raleigh 
has a Latin motto above the portrait, and 
a three-line inscription beneath. 

Marshall engraved a portrait of Jonson, 
"a laureated bust," which appeared on 
the frontispiece to " Horace," published 
in 1640. It was "printed for John Ben- 



96 



son." Ben Jonson for John Benson is 
good ! 

A portrait of Jonson by William Elder, 
"with ten lines within the measure," was 
in the edition of the " Works " dated 1692. 
This is simply an enlarged copy of the 
Vaughan print, with the same Latin and 
English inscriptions, 

William Elder was a Scotchman, who 
went to London about 1680. His portriats 
are not very many, nor do they represent 
a very distinguished list of names. 

It is not generally known, by the way, 
that on the square stone which covers 
the top of the head of Jonson's upright 
figure in the north aisle of the nave of the 
Abbey, his name is spelled with the "h " 
— '* O Rare Ben Johnson." 

Richard Brome, who died in 1652, ac- 
cording to the author of the " Biographia 
Dramatica," "wrote himself into high re- 
pute, although his extraction was mean, 
he having originally been no better than a 
menial servant to the celebrated Ben Jon- 
son." His quondam master addressed to 
him some complimentary lines on ac- 
count of his comedy called " The North- 



97 



ern Lass," which was acted at the Globe 
and at the Blackfriars, and was published 
in 1632 ; and one A. B. signed the six 
lines at the bottom of the portrait, which 
appeared in the volumes of " Five New 
Plays," printed in 1653-59: 

" Reader, lo here tliou wilt two faces finde, 
One of the body, t'other of the minde ; 
This by the Graver so, that with much strife 
Wee think Brome dead, hee's drawn so to the life. 
That by 's owne pen's done so ingeniously 
That who reads it, must think hee nere shall dy. 

"A. B." 

This "A. B." is, no doubt, Alexander 
Brome (1620- 1666), who wrote one com- 
edy of his own, and edited the ten com- 
edies of Richard Brome, published after 
the latter's death. He was an attorney 
in the Lord Mayor's Court, according to 
Langbaine, an enthusiastic Cavalier dur- 
ing the Civil Wars and the Protectorate ; 
and he was given to the composition of 
odes, sonnets, dithyrambs, songs, and epi- 
grams, all directed against the Round- 
heads and the " Rump." His relationship 
to his better-known namesake — known 
better, however, through Alexander's own 

7 



9S 



exertions only — was not one of blood, but 
of brains. They were the fruits of two very 
distinct family trees. 

Another writer of that, and a later peri- 
od, whose verse did much to strengthen 
the Royal Cause after the Restoratic^n, 
was Thomas D'Urfey, better known as 
"Tom." He lived until 1723; a contem- 
porary of the Bromes, and a survivor of 
Addison, who helped him in his old age, 
on the ground that D'Urfey had written 
more odes than Horace, about four times 
as many comedies as Terence, and had 
"enriched our language with a multitufle 
of rhymes, and bringing words together, 
that without his good offices would never 
have been acquainted with one another 
so long as it had been a tongue." He 
was a diverting companion and a volu- 
minous writer, but not one of the thirty 
or more "dramatic pieces" of D'Urfey 
enumerated in the " Biographia Dramat- 
ica " were "on the muster-roll of acting 
plays " when that useful book was com- 
piled, about half a century after his death ; 
and Bartlett dismisses him, in a foot-note, 
as the aulh<)r of a single Familiar Quo- 



99 



tation — " Over the hills and far away." 
His collection of songs, satires, and ir- 
regular odes, published in 17 19 under 
the quaint title, "Wit and Mirth, or Pills 
to Purge Melancholy," contains a por- 
trait by George Vertue, and these three 
lines : 

"Whilst D'Urfey's voice his verse dos raise 
When D'Urfey sings his Tunefull Layes 
Give D'Urfey's Lyric-Muse the Bayes." 

Although neither histor}^ nor tradition 
contains any account of intimate associa- 
tion between D'Urfey and Edward Ward 
(1667-1731), the author of "The Lon- 
don Spy," the simple fact that they were 
contemporaries, in London, that the one 
was a frequenter of taverns and the other 
a keeper of taverns, and the significant 
fact that each is still called, even at the 
end of two hundred years, by a familiar 
abbreviation of his first name, "Tom" or 
"Ned," would go to prove that they were 
both good fellows, and that they must 
have known each other. Giles Jacob, in 
his " Poetical Register," said that " Ned " 
Ward " kept a public house in the city, 



but in a genteel way;" and "Tom" 
D'Urfey was nothing if not genteel. 

The inscription under Ward's portrait, 
engraved by Michael Vander Gucht, and 
printed in the first edition of his " Nup- 
tial Dialogues," London. 1710 — the title is 
significant — is expressed in the first per- 
son, it was evidently written by Ward him- 
self, and it would seem to imply domestic 
relations which were somewhat strained. 
There can be little doubt, from the tone 
of the four lines, that *' Ned " was gener- 
ally spoken to, and spoken of, by the per- 
son of his house, as " Mr. Ward," or as 
" Edward." Thus they read : — 

"Grant me O Hea'n I Good Humor still to please 
My Wife, so long as she consults my Ease. 
But pive me courage, if she proves a Shrew 
To scorn wliat none could ever yet subdue." 

Michael Vander Gucht spent some 
time in Londc^n, and died there in 1725, 
at the age of sixty-six. He was the mas- 
ter of George Vertue between 1702 and 
1709, and the author of many engraved 
heads, including those of Daniel Defoe, 
1706; William Congreve, 1719; and John 
Aubrey, 1719. 



Ward died in Fulwood's Rents, High 
Holborn, and was buried in Old St. Pan- 
eras Church-yard, in the most quiet man- 
ner. According to the directions of his 
poetic will no costly funeral did his exec- 
utors prepare. 'Twixt sun and sun his 
only crave was a hearse and one black 
coach to bear his wife and children to his 
grave. This seems to show that Mistress 
Ward survived her husband, and con- 
sulted her own ease in paying him the 
final earthly honors. 

Aubrey said that Suckling (1608-1641) 
was "an extra- ordinarily accomplished 
gentleman, who grew famous at Court for 
his readie sparkling witt, as being uncom- 
mon readie at repartying, and as the 
greatest gallant of his time. He was of 
middle stature," Aubrey added, "and of 
slight strength, brisque eye, reddish fac't, 
and red nose (ill liver), his head not very 
big, his hayre a kind of sand colour;" 
an'd, still according to Aubrey, "he died 
a batchelor in Paris, and of Poyson, at 
the age of twenty- eight." Suckling, it 
will be remembered, was the author of 
"A Ballad upon a Wedding," containing 



the familiar lines: " Her feet beneath her 
petticoat. Like little mice stole in and 
out," etc. 

Marshall cnii;raved for the " Frap^menta 
Aiirca." London, 1646, a portrait of Suck- 
ling in which no perceptible elTect of the 
subject's ill liver, touched upon so deli- 
cately by Aubrey, is apparent. The ei^ht 
lines at the foot of the picture prove that 
their author did not fear the elTects of 
ill lights upon his forme. 

"SfCKLiN whose numbers could invite 
Alike to wonder and delight 
And with new spirit did inspire 
The TiiRsriAN Scene and l)clphick Lyre; 
Is thus cxprcst in cither part 
Above the humble reach of art ; 
Drnwne by the I'cncill here you find 
His Forme, by his owne Pen his mind.** 

The portrait of John Smith, alluded 
to above, contains one of the earliest in- 
scriptions in Mr. Chew's collection ; it 
is dated 161 6. and it is signed by John 
Davies. 

"These are the Lines that shew thy F.ncc, but those 
That shew thy Grace and Glory brighter bee; 
Thy Faire Discoveries and Foule Ovcrlhrowcs 
Of Salvages much Civilliz'd by thee 



I03 



Best shew thy Spirit; and to Glory Wyn, 
So, thou art Brasse without but Golde within 
If so ; in Brasse (too soft Smith's Acts to beare) 
I fix thy fame, to make Brasse Steele out weare 
Tliine, as thou art Virtues 

John Davies, Heref." 

John Davies, of Hereford, the epi- 
grammatist, was a writing-master and a 
poet : a writing-master to Henry, Prince 
of Wales, and a poet, although not a crown- 
ed laureate, to King James I. He lived 
among the wits and the players of his 
generation, Jonson, Bacon, Drayton, Sid- 
ney, Beaumont, and Fletcher ; and he 
compared Shakspere to Terence, in his 
"Scourge of Folly," undated but pub- 
lished before Shakspere died, and long 
before Shakspere was recognized as the 
Immortal even by his own intimates. This 
is one of the earliest printed tributes to 
the Immortal now in existence : but as it 
was not inscribed upon a portrait, it has 
no place here. 

In his reference to Captain Smith as be- 
ing Brasse without, and in remarking that 
Brasse, as a rule, is too soft a substance 
to bear Captain Smith's various Acts, 
Mr. Davies, of Hereford, was, perhaps. 



I04 



epigrammatic, perhaps sarcastic, and per- 
haps he intended to be facetious. Tliese 
lines were written some eight years before 
the appearance of the " Gcncrall His- 
toric," and, of course, before the writing- 
master could have read Captain Smith's 
vivid picture of one of his much civilized 
Salvages caught in the act of slaying, 
powdering, and eating his— the Salvage's 
— own wife : " Now, whether she was bet- 
ter roasted, boyled or carbonaded, I know 
not."saith the early and trustworthy his- 
torian of Virginia, New England, and the 
Summer Isles, "but of such a dish as 
poudcred wife I never heard of." This 
playful allusion to powdered wife, and 
this serious speculation as to how she 
were best cooked, Mr. Charles Dudley 
Warner considers the first recorded in- 
stance of what is called "American Hu- 
mor;" and he claims for Captain Smith, 
therefore, the honor of having been the 
first of the "American Humorists" — the 
quotation-marks are Mr. Warner's own — 
who have handled subjects of this kind 
with such pleasing gayety ! 

Mr. Granger and the later editors of 



los 



his great work were not very diffuse in 
their historical or chronological notes 
upon the British Heads they catalogued 
and described. The Jonson inscription 
under the Droeshout Shakspere is almost 
the only thing of its kind the work re- 
produces ; and nowhere is any mention 
made of this 1616 portrait of Captain 
Smith. The earliest print of the founder 
of the multitudinous name, noticed in 
Granger, is that in the " History of Vir- 
ginia," with the date 1632 ; and he referred 
to "a portrait by W. Richardson with six 
English verses," although he did not give 
its date, nor any hint as to where it first 
appeared. Walpole, however, said that 
Pass, probably Simon Pass, engraved a 
portrait of Smith in 1617. 

Pass was born in Utrecht, in 1591. He 
is known to have spent about ten years 
in England, his earliest work there, ac- 
cording to Walpole, being dated 161 3. 

The portrait-inscription, in Mr. Chew's 
collection, next to that of Smith in point 
of antiquity, is addressed to Lancelot 
Andrews (i 555-1626), and is dated 1618. 
The engraver is not known. The picture 



io6 



represents the learned prelate in cap and 
gown, and the lines are signed Ge : Wi : 
(George Wither). 

"These Lineaments of Art, have well set forth 
Some outward features (though no inward worth), 
But to these Lines his Writings added, cann 
Make up the faire resemblance of a Man. 
For as the Rodie's forme is figured here 
So there the beautyes of his Soui-E appeare, 
Which I had praised; but that in this place 
To praise Them, were to praise Hi.m to his P^ach. 

"Ge: Wi:" 

Lancelot Andrews was successively 
Bishop of Chichester, Ely, and Winches- 
ter; and he should have been Archbishop 
of Canterbury. Bishop Hackett, his bi- 
ographer, said of him that *' the ointment 
of his name was sweeter than spices " ; 
and Fuller, the biographer of almost every, 
body, remarked that " Andrews was so 
skilled in all, that the world wanted learn- 
ing to know how learned he was." What 
George Wither thougiit of him, as on his 
portrait inscribed, has been shown above. 

There are several portraits of Wither 
with laudatory verses attached. The ear- 
liest, engraved by W^illiam Holle, or Hole, 
was in "Abuses Stript and Whipt," Lon- 



I07 



don, 1615; and is one year earlier than 
the portrait of Smith. It exhibits the 
poet as very handsomely attired in rich 
slashed doublet, broad lace collar, and 
with a jewelled sword ; and it represents 
him rather as a frequenter of courts than 
as the man who " lashed the follies of the 
time." It bears the legend, " G. W. an° 
^tatis sua 21, 161 1. I grow and wither 
both together," and has these six lines, 
signed Si"- T I. : 

" Loe this is he whose infant Muse began 
To brave th' World before years stil'd him man, 
Though praise be slight, and scorns to make his Rymes 
Begg favors or opinion of the Tymes ; 
Yet few by good men have been more approv'd. 
None so unseene so generally loved." 

No man of any distinction in England 
during the reign of the First James, either 
as a poet or as a patron of poets, bore 
these initials. And it is not known now 
who this " Sir T I " was. 

William Holle, or Hole, flourished be- 
tween the years 1600 and 1630. Very little 
is recorded concerning him, except that he 
was the earliest engraver of music on cop- 
per-plate in England, and that he was the 



loS 



author of heads of John Florio, 1613; 
Chapman, 1616; and Drayton, 1619. 

The print of Wither, by Francis Dela- 
rani, with the date 1622, has the following 
lines : 

" No matter wher the NVorkd bestowes her Pkaisk, 
Or wliom she crownes w'th her victorious Hayes. 
For He that fearelesse hath oppos'd the Ckymks, 
And checkt the Gvant-vices of tlic Tymks: 
He that unchanged, hath Afflictions borne, 
Tliat smiles on Wants; that laughs Contempts to 

Scome ; 
And hath most Coirage where most Perills are. 
Is He that should of right the Laukkllb weare." 

Francis Delaram lived in the reigns of 
Elizabeth and her successor. He is the 
author of portraits of Elizabeth, Henry 
Prince of Wales, and Charles [I.] Prince 
of Wales ; and of a familiar print of " Will 
Sommers King Hener)es Jester [VHI.J, 
after Holbein." 

A third tribute to Wither was printed 
under the portrait by I. P. (John Payne] 
in the 1635 edition of the " Emblems": 

" What I was is passed by. 
What I am away doth flie, 
What I shall bee none do sec, 
Yet iu that my Beauties bee." 



log 



John Payne, a pupil of Simon Pass, was 
one of the earhest of the native Enghsh 
engravers of distinction, Evelyn spoke 
highly of him, and Walpole said, " The 
head of Dr. Alabaster I have [by Payne] ; 
and it truly deserves encomium ; being 
executed with great force, and in a more 
manly style than the works of his master." 

George Wither (i 588-1667) was a most 
voluminous writer. Allibone gave a list 
of nearly an hundred of his published 
works, in prose and in verse. He is be- 
lieved to have been the original author 
of the idea that "care will kill a cat" — 
which care has never yet succeeded in 
doing — and it was his poetical shepherd 
who could not understand why he — the 
shepherd — should waste in despair and 
die, because a fair woman preferred to be 
fair not to him but to somebody else. 

Charles Lamb in a letter to Southey, 
written in 1798, said : " I perfectly agree 
with your opinion of old Wither; Ouarles 
is a wittier writer, but Wither lays most 
hold of the heart. Ouarles thinks of his 
audience when he lectures ; Wither solilo- 
quizes in company from a full heart." 



Tliis, of course, refers to Francis Ouarles 
(1 592-1644). Marshall's portrait of Ouarles 
was engraved for " Solomon's Recanta- 
tion," London, 1645. Under four Latin 
lines, Alexander Ross (1590-1654), chap- 
lain to Charles L, the Royal Martyr for 
whom Quarles suffered martyrdom, wrote: 

"WhAt here wee sec is but a Graven f.^ce, 
t)ncly the smauuow of tliat brittle case 
Wherein were trcasur'd up those Gemms, which he 
iiath left behind him tu Pusteritie. 

*'At„ Ross." 

John Quarles (i624-i665),the ofTspring 
of old smooth Francis Quarles, does not 
seem to have been lK)rn a very great poet, 
although Granger declared him " to have 
been the poetical, as well as the natural, 
son of his Father. ' He was, at all events, 
a good royalist, who sufTered in the cause 
of his king; and he died of the Plague, 
and in poverty. 

Thomas May ( r 595-1650) wrote for Mar- 
shall's pK:)rtrait of John Quarles, to be 
found in the 1648 edition of" Fons Lach- 
rj'marum," the following inscription : 

" BiU for his Face the Work lud clearly gone 

For old smooth Quarles himself, and not his Sonne ; 



Who sighing how Kings fell, and Subjects rose, 
Scornes to mis-spend one single Teare in Prose. 
This Book's his shadowe, Hee's his Father's Shade 
Quarles is a Poet as well Borne as made. 

"T. M." 

May, the eulogist, was a better rhyme- 
ster, if not a better character, than the 
subject of his present verse. John Aubrey 
pictured him as a " Handsome man, de- 
bauch 'd ; lodged in the little square by 
Cannon Row, as you go through the Al- 
ley"; and Thomas Fuller asserted that 
" he was an elegant poet and translated 
Lucan into English." In early life he at- 
tached himself to the royalist cause, but 
tradition asserts that he expected to suc- 
ceed jonson in the laureateship, and that 
when Davenant received the appointment 
May changed his politics, and thenceforth 
warmly supported the other side. He 
wrote a prose " History of the Long Par- 
liament " and several plays, in verse. Tra- 
dition further says that he became very 
stout in his later years, and that he was 
accidentally strangled to death in his bed 
by the strings of his own night-cap ! 

Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), more than 
once quoted here, was the author of a very 



entertaining " History of the Worthies of 
England," published in 1662, after his 
death. It is full of gossipy anecdote, and, 
with John Aubrey's " Lives of Eminent 
Persons," it is the basis of much of the 
existing biography of the Men of his Time. 
His memory is said to have been marvel- 
lous, even if it was not always to be relied 
upon. The earliest portrait of Fuller is to 
be found in " Abel Redevivus, or the Dead 
yet Speaking." London. 165 1. It is not 
signed, but from the fact that the en- 
graved title bears the name of V'aughan, 
and because the style of the portrait is 
very like that of Vaughan, there is little 
doubt, in Mr. Chew's opinion, that 
Vaughan is its engraver. There arc no 
verses attached to it. 

Two portraits of Fuller, each having 
four-line inscriptions at the foot, are fa- 
miliar to the collectors. The first, by an 
unknown engraver, was printed in the 
" Life," London, i66i,and reads as follows : 

" X.iture t' expresse the Symctr)' of P.irts, 
Made this faire bulkc the Magazine of Arts: 
Rody and Minde doe answer well his Namr 
FuLLUK, Comparative to 's I>li';sk and I'*anic." 



"3 



The second, engraved by David Loggan, 
was in the 1662 edition of the "Worthies." 
It also plays upon the subject's name : 

"The Graver here hath well thy Face design 'd 
But no hand Fuller can expresse thy Mind. 
For that a Resurrection gives to those 
Whom silent Monuments did long enclose." 

David Loggan was born at Dantzic, in 
1635. He studied under Simon Pass, and 
settled in England before the Restoration. 
He engraved a portrait of Alexander 
Brome, 1664; and two of Isaac Barrow, 
the first dated 1683. Loggan died, ac- 
cording to varying accounts, in 1693 or 
in 1700. 

A contemporary of Loggan, and like 
Loggan an engraver imported into Eng- 
land, was F. H.Van Hove, who is described 
as having been " Dutch and prolific." He 
has left portraits of Bacon ; Sir Thomas 
Browne, 1672; and William Winstanley, 
1687. The dates of his plates cover a 
long period of time — from 1648 to 1692 — 
and not the least rare of them bears the 
head of Edward Cocker, with this inscrip- 
tion : 



114 



" Cocker who in fair writing did excell 
And in Aritbmetick perform'd as well, 
This necessary Work took next in hand 
That Etiglishnun might English understand." 

It is not positively known now in which 
of Cocker's works this portrait appeared. 
Besides writing his " Arithmetick," first 
published in 1654. which, accordin«i^ to 
Lowndes, saw upward of sixty editions, 
Cocker was a writing-master of great re- 
pute, and the author of many treatises upon 
this subject. Some of his quaint titles are 
worth recording. His "Copy Hook of Fair 
Writing " appeared in 1657; the " Penna 
Volans." in 1661; " England's Penman," in 
1671 ; "Cocker's Urania, or the Scliolar's 
Delight in Writing," bears no date; and in 
1675 he published "Cocker's Morals; or 
the Muses — a Book of Sentences for Writ- 
ing," etc. It is said that Cocker engraved 
many of his "copy-books" on silver 
plates and with his own hand. The above 
verses in all probability were attached to 
a portrait in some one, or more, of these 
volumes. The following verses, no doubt, 
were under a portrait in one of the many 
editions of the " Arithmetick ": 



115 



" Ingenious Cocker, now to rest tliou'rt gone 
No art can shew thee fully but thine own. 
Thy rare Arithmetick alone can show 
Th' vast sums of Thanks we for thy Labours owe." 

Edward Cocker — " Accordinsf-to-Cock- 
er" Cocker (1631-1677) — was, according 
to Edward Hatton, " a person well skilled 
in all the parts of arithmetic. He was also 
the most eminent composer and engraver 
of letters, knots and flourishes in his time." 
He was, too, a collector of books and man- 
uscripts; and, no doubt, a collector of the 
Inscribed Portraits of the men who flour- 
ished when he flourished himself. On 
the loth of August, 1664, Pepys wrote 
"Abroad to find out one to engrave my 
tables upon my new sliding rule with sil- 
ver plates. ... So I got Cocker the famous 
writing-master to do it, and I sat an hour 
by him to see him design it all ; and 
strange it is to see him, with his natural 
eyes, to cut so small at his first designing 
it, and read it all over, without any miss- 
ing, when for my life, I could not with my 
best skill, read one word or letter of it ; 
but it is use. ... I find the fellow, by his 
discourse, very ingenious ; and among oth- 



Ii6 



cr thinq;s a p^reat admirer of, and well read 
in, the English poets, and undertakes to 
judge of them all, and that not imperti- 
nently." 

Cocker's " Vuljj^ar Arithmetick " was 
the strange gift of Dr. Johnson to his 
landlady's daughter at Anach. *' Several 
ladies," wrote Mr. Boswell, "wishing to 
learn the kind of reading which the great 
and good Dr. Johnson esteemed most fit 
for a young woman, desired to know what 
book lie had selected for this Highland 
Nymph. . . . And what was this book.-* 
My reader prejxire your features for mer- 
riment. It was Cocker's Arithmetick ! " 

According to Cocker himself. Cocker 
was fond of fire-water, for he wrote in 
"Cocker's Farewell to Brandy "this awful 
warning: "Here lys one dead by Brandy's 
mighty power." It is not recorded, how- 
ever, that Brandy, or any other excess, was 
the cause of Cocker's taking off. 

Few of the Worthies of England who 
flourished at the beginning of the seven- 
teenth centur}' are better known, and bet- 
ter liked, at the end of the nineteenth 
century than is George Herbert (1593- 



117 



1632). His Life was written by Izaak 
Walton ; Bacon dedicated to him certain 
of his translations of the Psalms; Cole- 
ridge called him "that model of a man, a 
gentleman and a clergyman ;" he was the 
only author whom Cowper, during his 
melancholy, had any delight in reading; 
and Dr. Holmes, in his tribute "To Whit- 
ier on his Seventieth Birthday," two cen- 
turies and a half after the author of " The 
Church Porch " died, could give the good 
Quaivcr poet of the present " so fervid, so 
simple, so loving, so pure," no higher 
praise than to liken him " to Holy George 
Herbert, cut off from the Church." Thus 
hath Holy George Herbert, undivorced 
from the Church, lived through all these 
generations ! To paraphrase his own 
verse his own " Sweet and virtuous soule, 
like seasoned timber, never gives." 

" The Ethgies of Mr. George Herbert," 
engraved by John Sturt in an edition of 
the " Temple," published in London in 
1709, has this inscription : 

" Behold an Orator Divinely sage, 
The Prophet and Apostle of that age. 
View but his Pokch and Temple, you shall see 



iiS 



The Body of Divine Philosophy. 
Examine well the Lines of his dead face, 
Therein you may discern Wisdom and Grace. 
Now if the Shell so lovely doth appear, 
How Orient was the Pearl Imprison'd here!" 

John Sturt was born in 1658, and he 
died in f)ovcrty and neglect some seventy 
years later. He was fond of enij^raving 
the Lord's Prayer, certain of the Psalms, 
and all of the Ten Commandments in 
small compass, sometimes so small that 
they could not be read without the aid of 
a maj^nifying-glass. Among his subjects 
of a larger size was a portrait of John 
Runyan, a writer easily visible to the 
naked eye. 

Good Izaak Walton, who wrote the 
Life of John Donne (i 576-1631), as well as 
of George Herbert, is the author of the 
eight lines to the former gentleman at the 
foot of Marshall's portrait of Donne, print- 
ed with the " Poems " in 1635 : 

"This was for Youth, Strength, mirth and wit that Time 
Most count their (ioldcn Age; but 'twas not thine. 
Thine only was thy later years, so much refined 
From youth's Drossc, mirth and wit a.s thy pure mind 
Thought (like the Angels) nothing but the Praise 
Of thy Creator, as those last best Dayes. 



119 



Witness this Booke (thy Emblem) which begins 
With Love ; but endes, with Siglies and Teares for 
Sins. ■•' Is. Wa." 

The portrait represents the future di- 
vine and poet at the age of eighteen. 
Hence the allusion to his youth and its 
" Drosse." 

Vaughan engraved a portrait of " Abra- 
ham Cowley [i 6 1 8- 1 667 J at the age of 
thirteen," which contains six lines of Eng- 
lish verse, and was prefixed to the first 
edition of " Poetical Blossoms," published 
in London in 1633, when Cowley was a 
pupil at Westminster School, and only 
fifteen years of age. 

The Cowley inscription is unsigned. 

" Reader when first thou shalt behold this Boyes 
Picture, perhaps thou shalt think his writings toyes : 
Wrong not our Cowley so ; will nothing passe 
But gravity with thee? Apollo was 
Beardlesse himselfe, and for ought I can see 
Cowley may youngest Sonne of Phabus bee." 

Another younger son of Phoebus, beard- 
less as Cowley or Apollo, was Francis 
Hawkins, who before he was eight years 
of age translated from the language of 
France a book entitled " Youth's Be- 



haviour; or Decency in Conversation 
Amongst Men ; Composed in French by 
Grave Persons for the Use and Benefit 
of their Youth ; now Xewly Turned into 
English." The work was first printed 
when Francis was in his thirteenth year ; 
and it saw nine editions in all. In his 
" Address to the Publick " the publisher 
of the second edition — 1646 — apologized 
for " the Style . . . wrought by an un- 
couth and rough File of one greene in 
years." The edition of 1654 contains a 
portrait of the youth — according to 
Granger, by John Payne — under which, 
with the title : — " Francis Hawkins about 
the Age of Ten Years," is this inscription : 

" See here th' efBgies of a Child whose witt 
So far outstripps his jears & ruder thronge 
That at Ten years he doth teach youth what's fitt 
For their behavour from a forraigne tongue." 

Hawkins entered the Society of Jesus in 
1662 — he was born in 1628 — and he is now 
entirely forgotten, save by the few col- 
lectors of such things who are fortunate 
enough to p)OSsess the rare portrait in 
question. The fact that John Hawkins, 



the father of Francis, was a translator 
from the Spanish and the Italian, may, 
perhaps, account, in a measure, for the 
precocity of the son in putting into Eng- 
lish, in such ver\- green vears, the writine^s 
of certain of the French. 

Still another youth who lisf>ed in num- 
bers as a child, and whose wit far out- 
stripped his years, but who is by no means 
forgotten now, was John Milton (i6oS- 
1674). " When he went to schoole, when 
he was very young," said John Aubrey, 
'* he studied very hard, and sate up ven,- 
iate, commonly till twelve or one o'clock 
at night, and his father ordered the ma^de 
to sitt up for him, and in those years [ten] 
composed mzny copies of verses which 
might well become a riper age."' 

There are in existence several f)ortraits 
of Milton as a child, but most of them are 
proleptic, and none of them are prefixed 
to the works published during his child- 
hood, for the simple reason that he pub- 
lished no works until his epitaph to 
Shakspere was printed in the Folio of 
1632. when its author was twenty- -four 
years of age. The earliest engraved f>or- 



trait of Milton is that by Marshall, which 
figures as a frontispiece in his juvenile 
" Poems," issued by Moseley in 1645. It 
must have been taken from a still earlier 
original painting, for it distinctly calls him 
a youth of twenty-four, and the four lines 
of Greek verse at the bottom seem to in- 
dicate that Milton himself did not alto- 
gether indorse it as a likeness. No other 
satisfactory portrait of him could have 
been known to the engraver ; and none 
appears to have existed, although Milton 
was then thirty-seven years of age, and 
was living, and teaching school, in the 
Barbican, Aldersgate Street, on unpleas- 
ant terms with his first wife, and his first 
wife's relations. George Vertue knew of 
no likeness of Milton between this of 
Marshall's in 1645 — with no English in- 
scription — and "the front " engraved by 
Faithorne for the " History of Britain," 
published in 1670, when Milton was sixty- 
two. 

Mr. Charles B. Foote is the fortunate 
possessor of Vertue's own copy of one of 
his engravings of Milton. Below the por- 
trait, Vertue has written, " This was done 



123 



from the original print, engraved by W. 
Faithorne,"and on the back of the portrait 
in Vertue's handwriting, signed G. V., are 
the following remarks : " This picture of 
Milton was painted in oyl, and had been 
in the Family until the death of Milton's 
third wife who kept it with great regard. 
She lived to a great age and died at Nant- 
wich, in Cheshire. This was bought by a 
Gent, who brought it to London and sold 
it to the Honbi Arthur Onslow, Speaker, 
from whence I engraved it." 

Old Jacob Tonson printed a monu- 
mental folio edition of Milton's works, 
"adorned with sculptures," prefixed to 
which, in a handsome frame, was a beau- 
tiful portrait of Milton engraved by Rob- 
ert White, and containing the celebrated 
verses by Dryden : 

"Three Poets in three distant Ages born, 
Greece, Italy and England, did adorn; 
The First, in loftiness of thought surpas'd ; 
The Next in Majesty; in both the Last. 
The force of Nature cou'd no further goe ; 
To make a Third, she joyn'd the former two.'* 

Tonson was so proud of this perform- 
ance that when his portrait was painted 



124 



by Knellcr for the Kit-Kat Club he had 
himself represented with the volume 
under his arm. A copy of this Milton 
folio, in fine old English binding, has 
been presented to The Players by Mr. 
Samuel P. Avery. 

Robert White was born in London in 
1645, ^"^' according to Walpole, he died 
in 1704. although some of his plates are 
said to bear a later date. He was a pupil 
of Loggan, and a successful and volumi- 
nous engraver of portraits. In the Gro- 
lier Exhibition were, among others, the 
following examples of iiis work : Baxter, 
1667, and 1670; Herbert, 1670; Flatman, 
16S2; Bunyan, 168S; Pcpys, 16S8; and 
Jeremy Collier, 1 701. Walpole said "Many 
of White's heads were taken by himself, 
by a black lead pencil on vellum. . . . Ver- 
tue thought them superior to his prints;" 
and Granger wrote that " he was never 
exceeded in the truth of his drawings." 

A tablet containing Dr^den's lines to 
Milton was placed, many years ago, upon 
the outer — Watling Street — wall of the 
church of All Hallows, Bread Street, 
which stood upon the site of the edifice 



125 



(destroyed in the Great Fire) in which 
Milton was christened. When the second 
All Hallows Church was taken down, in 
1878, the tablet was inserted in the west 
wall of Bow Church, where it is still to 
be seen of every passer-by. 

To end at the beginning. Professor 
Lounsbury.the recognized authority upon 
the subject, says that there is but one au- 
thentic portrait of Chaucer in existence— 
that made by Occleve upon the margin 
of one of his own works ; a colored draw- 
ing of the man he styled his Master and 
his Father. It was painted from memory, 
as Occleve confessed, and probably after 
Chaucer's death. Thomas Occleve, or 
Hoccleve, was a poet, and a Writer to the 
Privy Seal. He is supposed to have been 
born about 1370, and to have died about 
1454; which would make him many years 
Chaucer's junior, and his survivor for more 
than half a century. The Occleve por- 
trait is on Leaf No. 91 of Occleve's " De 
Regimine Principum," Harleian MS., 
4866. Upon it, of course, every subse- 
quent likeness of Chaucer is based. George 
Vertue engraved at least three portraits 



126 



of Chaucer; the earliest, dated 1717, was 
for John Urry's first edition of the " Life 
and Works of Chaucer," pubHshed in 1721. 
It has no inscription. The second, also 
in folio, was engraved for Vertue s set of 
the English Poets. The head is an ex- 
act copy of tiie portrait made for Urry's 
edition, although the ornamental frames 
are entirely unlike. It contains the fol- 
lowing verses, written by Occleve himself, 
to accompany his original sketch of the 
Master and the Father of them all; and, 
although the portrait is late, the inscrip- 
tion is tlie earliest on record : 

"Althogh hys lyf he queynt the resemhiance 
Of hyin hatli in me so fresch loftynesse 
That to putte othir men in rembraunce 
Of hys psone I have here hys lykness 
So make to this ende in sothfastnesse 
That they ^ have of hym lost thought and nivnde 
By tlivs pcvnture may ageyn hym fynde." 

An octavo print of Chaucer by Vertue 
was issued in the edition of the Canter- 
bury Tales, published by Dr. Morell. Lon- 
don. 1737. 

George Vertue (1684-1756) is famous as 
an antiquar}' and a scholar, as well as 



127 



an artist. He belonged to a generation 
later than that of Droeshout, Faithorne, 
and Marshall. He was the author of sev- 
eral literary works upon engravings, and 
collections of engravings ; and his notes 
and memoranda concerning English art 
were purchased, after his death, by Wal- 
pole, and became the basis of the " Anec- 
dotes of Painting." His powers of catch- 
ing and preserving a likeness are said to 
have been great, and his prints, on that 
account, are of much value and interest. 
Walpole gave a list of them which covers 
many pages, and includes a series of seven- 
teen English Poets — from this portrait of 
Chaucer down to John Dryden. 

There are extant, and addressed to all 
sorts and conditions of men and women, 
Portrait Inscriptions enough to fill a vol- 
ume of any of the various editions of the 
British Poets now so common on both 
sides of the Atlantic. Those that are giv- 
en here are only a few specimens of this 
interesting and obsolete form of literature; 
taken, almost exclusively, from the In- 
scriptions attached to the Portraits of 
the British Worthies who have made 



128 



British Literature itself, not those who 
have made British Laws or British His- 
tory. 

The Poets of Britain and of America 
to-day who write in Enghsh, dedicate 
their books, in verse, to their friends, and 
inscribe their presentation copies, in verse, 
to their intimates ; but they leave their 
portraits, in the frontispiece, to speak for 
themselves, even when they feel that some- 
body else must speak for their poetry. To 
quote the slang of the profession — they 
get their Advance Notices in some other 
way. 



ON POETICAL DEDICATIONS 



CHAPTER V 



ON POETICAL DEDICATIONS 




HE first of the British period- 
ical essayists, and the father 
of all later contributors to 
English and American mag- 
azines, wrote in The Tatler 
on May 26, 17 10, and from The Trumpet, 
in Sheer Lane, that "the ingenious Mr. 
Pinkethman, the comedian, had made 
him a high Compliment in a facetious 
Distich by way of Dedication to his en- 
deavours." This distich, unfortunately, 
has not been preserved ; but it gave to the 
editor of The Tatler an opportunity to 
discourse most wisely upon the " Differ- 
ence betwixt ancient and modern Dedica- 
tions ": 

"In olden Times," he wrote, "it was 
the Custom [for authors] to address their 
Works to some eminent for their Merit 



132 



to Mankind, or particular Patronage of 
the Writers themselves, or Knowledge in 
the Matter of which they treated. Under 
these Regards it was a memorable Honour 
to both Parties, and a very agreeable Rec- 
ord of their Commerce with each other." 
"But," he added later, "vain Flourishes 
came into the World, with other barbar- 
ous Embellishments; and the Enumer- 
ation of Titles and great Actions in the 
Patrons themselves, or their Sires, are as 
foreign to the Matter in Hand as the Or- 
naments are in a Gothic Building." 

And thus, for a page or two, the vener- 
able gentleman, then known to the read- 
ing world as Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff. berat- 
ed his contemporaries, the moderns, for 
the fulsomeness and unmeaningness of 
their dedications, in a volume which is 
inscribed to the Right Honorable Will- 
iam, Lord Cowper, Baron of Wingham, 
and is signed " My Lord, Your Lordship's 
Most Devoted, Most Obedient, and Most 
Humble Servant, Richard Steele"! 

The history of the dedications of books 
goes back as far as the beginning of the 
history of books themselves. Among the 



133 



ancients, concerning whom The Tatler 
•wrote, dedications were little more than 
prefaces and introductions, and it was not 
until what The Tatler considered mod- 
ern times that they became the pegs upon 
v/hich the author hung the compliments 
he bestowed upon that particular " Pa- 
tron " who was willing to pay most gener- 
ously for his praises. It is a curious fact 
that the earliest printed addresses and in- 
scriptions of the poets themselves were 
generally written in prose, although it 
was a prose which contained, as a rule, 
quite as much poetry as truth ; and that 
of all the examples, ancient and modern, 
noted and quoted in Mr, Henry B. Wheat- 
ley's interesting volume entitled " The 
Dedications of Books," not more than 
half a dozen are in verse. 

Horace dedicated his first Ode, his first 
Epistle, and his first Satire, in metre, to 
his friend and patron, Maecenas : 

"MjEcenas, scion of a race 
Of kings, my fortune's crowning grace 
And constant stay." — (Book I., Ode I.) 

And Catullus dedicated his poems to 



134 



Cornelius Nepos, in lines which Mr, An- 
drew Lang has put into English for Mr. 
Brander Matthews's " Ballads of Books," 
as reprinted here : 

'^ Quoi dono lepidiim novum libelhmi.''^ 

" My little book, tliat's neat and new, 
Fresh polished with dry pumice stone, 
To whom, Cornelius, but to you 
Shall this be sent, for you alone — 
(Who used to praise my lines, my own) 
Have dared in weighty volumes three 
(What labors, Jove, what learning thine !) 
To tell the tale of Italy, 
And all the legend of our line. 

" So take, whate'er its worth may be. 
My book, — but Lady and Queen of Song, 
This one kind gift I crave of thee, 
That it may live for ages long I " 

This same Mr. Andrew Lang, after res- 
cuing the " Book " of Catullus from the 
language in which it had lain dead during 
so many ages, dedicated his own " Books 
and Bookmen," at the end of nineteen 
hundred years, and in accents unknown 
in the days of Catullus, to this same Mr. 
Brander Matthews, who had found for 
his wandering papers a home and a pub- 
lisher in States then unborn. 



135 

"You took my vagrom essays in, 
You found them shelter over sea; 

Beyond the Atlantic's foam and din 

You took my vagrom essays in ! 

If any value there they win 
To you he owes them, not to me. 

You took my vagrom essays in. 
You found them shelter over sea!" 

In the mean time Mr. Lang himself was 
made the subject of a poetic epistle 
which, if not a dedication, is worth re- 
printing here. In his " Underwoods " Mr. 
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote : 

" Dear Andrew, with the brindled hair. 
Who glory to have thrown in air, 
High over arm, the trembling reed, 
By Ale and Kail, by Till and Tweed : 
An equal craft of hand you show 
The pen to guide, the fly to throw: 
I count you happy starred; for God, 
When He with inkpot and with rod 
Endowed you, bade your fortune lead 
Forever by the crooks of Tweed, 
Forever by the woods of song 
And lands that to the Muse belong; 
Or if in peopled streets, or in 
The abhorred pedantic sanhedrim, 
It should be yours to wander, still 
Airs of the morn, airs of the liill, 
The plovery Forest and the seas 
That break about the Hebrides, 



136 



Should follow over field and plain 

And find you at the window pane ; 

And you again see hill and peel, 

And the bright springs gush at your heel. 

So went the fiat forth, and so 

Garrulous like a brook you go, 

With sound of happy mirth and sheen 

Of daylight— whether by the green 

You fare that moment, or the gray; 

Whether you dwell in March or May; 

Or whether treat of reels and rods 

Or of the old unhappy gods : 

Still like a brook your page has shone, 

And your ink sings of Helicon." 

To which Mr. Lang replied in the fol- 
lowing lines : 

" Dear Louis of the awful cheek. 
Who told you it was right to speak, 
Where all the world might hear and stare, 
Of other fellows' 'brindled luir?' 
' Shadows we are,' the sophist knew — 
Sludows — 'and shadows we pursue.' 
For this my Ghost shall chase your shadow 
F'rom Skerry vore to Colorado." 

But to return to the gentlemen who 
even in Mr. BickerstatT's time were styled 
the " ancients." Master Geoffrey Chau- 
cer, the " Floure of Poetes throughout all 
Britain " — 

"ITiat nobly enterprysed 
How that our Englisshe might fresslJy be enucd," 



137 



while given to prologues, does not seem 
to have indulged himself in dedications, 
although at the emi of the last book of 
"Troylus and Cryseyde " he thus ad- 
dressed a brother of the pen : 

" O moral Gower, this boke I directe 
To the, and to the philosophical Strode, 
To vouchen-sauf, ther nede is, to correcte. 
Of youre benignites and zeles goode." 

Gower returned the compliment in the 
first form of the " Confessio Amantis ;" 
omitting the eulogy, however, in the 
second form. 

Chaucer's editors on more than one 
occasion have supplied Chaucer's defi- 
ciencies in dedication, for William Wynne, 
Chief Clerk of the Kitchen to Henry 
VIII. , and editor of the first edition of 
Chaucer's works (1532), inscribed his vol- 
ume " to that most gracious Defencer of 
the Christen Faithe, his most dradde sov- 
eraygne lord ;" and Dryden dedicated his 
version of the " Tales from Chaucer," in 
the beginning of the eighteenth century, 
to the Duchess of Ormond, in lines be- 
ginning, 



i.^,S 



"The bard who first adorn'd our native tongue, 
Tuned to his British lyre this ancient song : 
Which Homer might without a blush rehearse, 
And leaves a doubtful palm in Virgil's verse ; 
He match'd their beauties, where they most excel ; 
Of love sung better, and of arms as well." 

Spenser's Poetical Dedications, that to 
the Earl of Leicester, " late deceased," 
prefixed to his "Virgil's Gnatt " one of the 
"Complaints," published in 1 591, and that 
to " Maister Philip Sidney " introducing 
" The Shepherd's Calender " have nothing 
in them which warrants their being re- 
printed here. 

The fact that Samuel Page, of Corpus 
Christi College, Oxford, dedicated " The 
Loves of Amos and Lama" — not his 
"Alcilia," as Mr. Whcatley has it — to 
Izaak Walton, in 161 9, is worthy of note, 
because at that time Walton was only 
twenty-six years of age, and was entirely 
unknown to the world except as the oc- 
cupant of a linen-draper's shop, seven- 
feet-and-a-half long and five feet wide, in 
the Royal Bourse, in Cornhill. His first 
work, the " Life of Doctor Donne," was 
not published until 1640, and "The Com- 
pleat Angler" did not appear until 1653. 



139 



When Page wrote his lines to the humble 
sempster he little dreamed that on their 
account alone posterity would remember 
him. Here are his claims to immortality : 

"TO MY APPROVED AND MUCH RESPECTED 
FRIEND, IZ. \VA. 

"To thee, thou more than thrice belovdd friend, 
I too unworthy of so great a blisse, 
These harsh-tun'd lines I here to thee commend, 
Thou being cause it is now as it is ; 

For hadst thou held thy tongue by silence might 
These have been buried in oblivion's night. 

"If they were pleasing, I would call them thine. 
And disavow my title to the verse ; 
But being bad, 1 needes must call them mine, 
No ill thing can be cloathed in thy verse. 
Accept them then, and where I have offended 
Rase thou it out, and let it be amended." 

Perhaps these are the verses which in- 
spired the subject of them to write five- 
and-thirty years later that angling and 
poetry are somewhat alike — " Men are to 
be born so !" He must have been a good 
fellow even in his youth, this Izaak Wal- 
ton, born so himself. " The Compleat 
Angler " was dedicated in prose " To the 
Right Worshipful John Offley, of Madely 



I40 



Manor, in the County of StaiTord, Es- 
quire." 

John Taylor, "the Water Poet," dedi- 
cated " Et Habco, Et Careo, Et Curo, A 
Poem " (1621), 

'•TO EVERYBODY: 

" Yet not to every Reader, doe I write 
But onley unto such as can Read right ; 
And with impartial censures can declare, 
As they find things to judge them as they are." 

The reader of early biographical litera- 
ture cannot help being impressed with 
the fact that most of the British men of 
letters before the close of the Georgian 
era are chronicled as being the Father 
of something. Chaucer was the Father 
of English Poetry; Walton the Father of 
Angling; Richardson the Father of the 
British Novel ; Granger the Father of 
Extra-illustration ; Steele the Father of 
the British Essay ; and now comes a Scot- 
tish bookseller who figures as the Father 
of the Circulating Library. Allan Ramsay 
began life as a wigmaker in Edinburgh. 
He wrote a second canto to " Christ's 
Kirk of the Grene," no less than two 



141 



kings of Scotland claiming the authorship 
of the first ; he was esteemed so highly by 
Hogarth that the twelve plates of " Hudi- 
bras"were dedicated to him in 1726, and 
he figures in these pages as the author of 
a Poetical Dedication to Josiah Burchet, 
Esq., prefixed to "The Gentle Shepherd," 
his own great work, and closing as fol- 
lows: 

"May never care your blessings sowr, 
A'n may the Muses, ilka hour. 
Improve your mind, an' haunt your bow'r, 

I'm but a callan ; 
Yet may I please you, while I'm your 

Devoted Allan." 

Ramsay retired from his original pro- 
fession of "skull-thatching," as he him- 
self somewhere described it, in 17 18 or 
1719, and during the rest of a long life he 
either sold, loaned, or made books. He 
was intimate with Gay, admired of Pope, 
praised by Boswell, snubbed by Johnson, 
and, according to Sir Walter Scott, he was 
the lamp at which Burns lighted his torch. 

While dedications are not always alto- 
gether pleasing to the persons to whom 
they are addressed, it is not often that 
their very abusiveness adds to the market 



142 



value of the books which contain them, as 
in the case of Churchill's "Sermons on 
the Lord's Prayer." Among their reputed 
author's posthumous papers was found 
an unfinished dedication to William War- 
burton, Dean of Bristol and Bishop of 
Gloucester, the character of which in- 
spired the publishers to give ^250 sterling 
for the ten sermons to which it was pre- 
fixed, sermons so poor in themselves that 
they are generally believed to have been 
the work of a duller, but better, man than 
the writer of " The Rosciad." Whoever 
originally delivered the discourses, how- 
ever, there can be no question as to the 
authorship of the dedication. It is writ- 
ten in a strain of terrible irony. 

"To Doctor! Dean! Bishop! Glo'sterl and My Lord! 

Let not thy brain (as br.iins less potent might) 
Dizzy, confounded, giddy with the height, 
Turn round, and lose distinction, lose her skill 
And wonted power of knowing good from ill. 
Of sifting truth from falsehood, friends from foes; 
Let Glo'ster well remember how he rose, 
Nor turn his back on men who made him great; 
Let him not, gorged with power, and drunk with state, 
Forget what once he was though now so high, 
How low, how mean, and full as poor as L" 



143 



The Bishop of Gloucester, gorged with 
power, lived fourteen or fifteen years after 
this, and must have found comfort in the 
fact that the publishers of the Sermons 
suffered as much in their pockets by the 
venture as he did in his feelings. 

It is not possible here to quote, or even 
to enumerate, the Poetical Dedications of 
the men of modern times. In previous 
generations, but within the present cen- 
tury, Keats inscribed, in 1817, to Leigh 
Hunt the little volume of poems which 
had already been printed in Hunt's Ex- 
aminer ; and Tom Hood dedicated his 
" Hero and Leander " to Coleridge in 1828. 



' It is not with a hope my feeble praise 
Can add one moment's honor to thy own, 
That with thy mighty name I grace these lays; 
I seek to glorify myself alone : 
For that some precious favor thou hast shown 
To my endeavor in a bygone time, 
And by this token I would have it known 
Thou art my friend, and friendly to my rhyme ! 
It is my dear ambition now to climb 
Still higher in thy thought, — if my bold pen 
May thrust on contemplations more sublime, — 
But I am thirsty for thy praise, for when 
We gain applauses from the great in name 
We seem to be partakers of their fame." 



144 



Shelley's " Oucen Mab," printed in 1S13, 
was dedicated " To Harriet " in lines be- 
ginning: 

" Whose is the love that, gleaming through the world, 
Wards off the poisonous arrow of its scorn ? 
Whose is the warm and partial praise, 
Virtue's most sweet reward ? 

" Beneath whose looks did my reviving soul 
Riper in truth and virtuous daring grow ? 
Whose eyes have I gazed fondly on. 
And loved mankind the more ? 

"Harriet, on thine: thou wort my purer mind. 
Thou wcrt the inspiration of my song." 

Whetlicr this was written to Harriet 
Grove, his first love, or to Harriet West- 
brook, his first wife, the commentators 
have not been able to decide ; but there 
is no doubt that the " Mary " to whom 
" Laon and Cythna" (The Revolt of Islam) 
was dedicated in 181 8 was the Mary God- 
win to whom he had then but lately been 
married. In it he says: 

" So now my summer task is ended, Mary, 
And I return to thee, mine own heart's home." 

Scott prefaced the different cantos of 



145 



" Marmion " with poetical letters to dif- 
ferent friends ; and Byron, in what he 
called " good, simple, savage verse," ded- 
icated " Don Juan " to Southey. 

" Bob Southey ! You're a poet — Poet-laureate, 
And representative of all the race. 
Although 'tis true that you turned out a Tory at 
Last — yours has lately been a common case." 

Among the men of our own da}'', Bay- 
ard Taylor dedicated, in verse, his " Poems 
of Home and Travel " to George H. Bokcr, 
and his " Poems of the Orient " to Mr. 
Richard H. Stoddard ; Mr. Stoddard in- 
scribing to Boker his " Songs of Summer." 
Mr. Swinburne dedicated " Songs of the 
Springtide " to Edward John Trelawney ; 
Mr. Whittier, " In War Times," to Sam- 
uel E. and Harriet \V. Sewell, of Melrose ; 
Longfellow, the " Ultima Thule," to G. 
W. G. (George W. Greene) ; John Fors- 
ter, the " Life of Goldsmith," to Charles 
Dickens ; and Owen Meredith, " The Wan- 
derer," to J. F., in a long poem dated Flor- 
ence, September 24, 1857. 

"Susan Coolidge"dedicated her" Verses" 
(Boston, 1881) 



14^ 



"To J. H.,& E. W. II. 

" Nourished by peaceful suns and gracious dew, 
Your sweet youth budded, and your sweet lives grew, 
And all the world seemed rose-beset for you. 

" Only this le.if, a single petal flung, 
One chord from a full harmony unsung. 
May speak the life-long love that lacks a tongue." 

"Vignettes in Rhyme," the first Ameri- 
can edition of Mr. Austin Dobson's verses^ 
was introduced to American readers by 
Mr. E.G. Stedman, to whom Mr. Dobson 
dedicated his second vohmie, entitled 
" At tlie Sign of tlie Lyre." 

" No need to-day that wc commend 
This pinnace to your care, oh, friend! 
You steered the bark that went before 
Hctween the whirlpool and the shore, 
So — though we want no pilot now — 
We write your name upon the prow." 

In like manner he dedicated his "Prov- 
erbs in Porcelain" to Mr. Frederick Lock- 
cr-Lampson, who is, perhaps, his only con- 
temporary rival in their own peculiar and 
delightful line. 

" Is it to kindest friend I send 
This nosegay gathered new? 



147 

Or is it more to critic sure — 

To singer clear and true? 
I know not wliich, indeed, nor need. 

All three I find in you." 

H. C. Banner's "Airs from Arcady " are 
inscribed 

"To BRANDER MATTHEWS: BY THE 
HEARTH. 

"Take these, the gathered songs of striving years. 
And many fledged and warmed beside your hearth • 
Not for whatever they may have of worth — 
A simpler tie, perchance, my work endears. 

" With them this wish : that when your days shall close, 
Life, a well-used and well-contented guest, 
May gently press the hand I oft have pressed, 
And leave you by Love's fire to calm repose." 

Mr. Whittier's gift to his intimates of 
a privately printed volume of his recent 
verse is inscribed to " The poet and friend 
of poets," Mr. E. C. Stedman, with these 
lines : 

" Poet, and friend of poets, if thy glass 
Detects no flower in winter's tuft of grass. 
Let this slight token of the debt I owe 
Outlive for thee December's frozen day. 
And, like the arbutus budding under snow. 
Take bloom and fragrance from some morn of May 
When he who gives it shall have gone the way 
Where faith shall see and reverent trust shall know.'' 



I4S 



n 



Lowell, by his own fireside, talked to 
Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, in " Under the 
Willows," of old times and of old scenes. 

" I sit and I dream that I hear, as of yore, 
My Elmwood chimney's deep-throated roar. 
If much be gone, there is much remains; 
liy the embers of love I count my gains, 
You and yours with tlie best, till the old hope glows 
In the fanciful tlarae as 1 toast my toes." 

Rather more tender is the dedication 
to " Among my Books." 

•'To F. D. L. 

" Love comes and goes with music in his feet, 
And tunes young pulses to his roundelays ; 
Love brings thee this: will it persuade thee, .Sweet, 
That he turns proscr when he comes and stays?" 

These lines suf,'gest Browninp^'s "One 
Word More " at the conclusion of " Men 
and Women," inscribed 

"To E. B. B. 

"There they are, my fifty men and women, 
Naming me the fifty poems finished ! 
Take them, love the book and me together: 
Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also." 

To another good wife Mr. Aldrich dedi- 
cated " Flower and Thorn." 



149 



To L. A. 



"Take them and keep them. 
Silvery thorn and flower, 
Plucked just at random 
In the rosy weather — 
Snowdrops and pansies, 
Sprigs of wayside heather. 
And five-leaved wild rose 
Dead within an hour. 

"Take them and keep them: 
Who can tell ? some day, dear 
(Though they be withered, 
Flower and thorn and blossom), 
Held for an instant 
Up against thy bosom, 
They might make December 
Seem to thee like May, dear!" 

And Professor Boyesen dedicated his 
"Idyls of Norway," in 1882, 

"To L. K. B. 

" I fain would praise thee with surpassing praise, 
To whom my soul its first allegiance gave; 
For thou art fair as thou art wise and brave, 
And like the lily that with sweet amaze 
Rocks on its lake and spreads its golden rays 
Serenely to the sun and knows not why, 
Thou spreadst the tranquil splendor of thine eye 
Upon my heart and fiUst the happy days, 
Brimmed with the fragrance and the light of thee. 



ISO 



Mute was my life and chill ere thee it found; 
Like dumbly heaving waves it rolled along 
In voiceless wrestling on a barren sea, 

Until it broke with sudden rush of sound, 
Upon thy sunny shore in light and song." 

One of the most touchingof dedications 
is that of Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, 
contained in his " Afterwhiles." It is 
very simple and very brief. 

"To HUMBOLDT RILEY. 

" I cannot say, and I will not say 
Tlut he is dead— He is just away." 

The Poetical Dedication to the book is 
what the prologue is to the play. They 
both serve to explain to the public the 
circumstances of the action of the work 
they introduce, or the situation in which 
the writer stands, or wishes to stand, in 
regard to the world at large. They ad- 
dress sometimes the whole audience of 
readers, but more often some one particu- 
lar individual whose commerce with the 
author, as The Tathr quaintly puts it, is 
agreeable and affectionate, and an honor 
to them both. The score or so of poetical 
dedications given here, and the hundreds 



151 



of Others which must readily occur to the 
lover of books, will show, as emphatically 
as any other form of literature, the changes 
of thought and expression in English let- 
ters during the last five hundred years. 



ON POETICAL INSCRIPTIONS 




CHAPTER VI 
ON POETICAL INSCRIPTIONS 

UITE as interesting as "Po- 
etical Dedications," and 
much more valuable, because 
more rare, are those occa- 
sional autograph inscrip- 
tions in verse to be found on the fly- 
leaves of certain printed books, but not 
originally intended to be printed them- 
selves. They may be divided into three 
classes : first, those written by the author 
in the special copy of his own book which 
he has presented to his friend ; second, 
those written by the recipient in the vol- 
ume which his friend the author has pre- 
sented to him; and third, those written 
in the books of men who are known 
neither to donor nor to recipient. They 
are fuller than marginal notes, and they 
are more personal and more spontaneous 



1.^6 



than dedications ; they render the tomes 
in which they are contained absolutely 
unique, and sometimes they make a vol- 
ume as precious to the collector of auto- 
graphs as to the lover of books. A copy 
of "Venus and Adonis." for instance, in 
which Shakspere had written with his 
own hand, 

" Don't steale this Booke, my little Frcnd 
For feare the Gallowcs will be your end'" 

-if it existed-would be worth a mount- 
am of First Folios of the Plays. There 
were only twenty-seven leaves in the little 
quarto volume in question, as first pub- 
lished in 1593, so the author could not 
have completed the inscription, 

" If you don't beleeve this Book is mine, 
Just turn to P.ige number ninety nine." 

but as literature and as poetry the famil- 
lar quatrain is certainly as worthy of the 
author of - Venus and Adonis " as are the 
famous four lines carved upon the stone 
which is said to cover the dust and the 
bones enclosed in front of the altar of Holy 
Trinity Church at Stratford-on-Avon. 



157 



The Ancients, as The Tatlcr called 
them, were much given to writing sonnets 
to each other ; but these were not always 
strictly personal — nor strictly true ; and 
they always found their way into their au- 
thors' printed works, if not into the publi- 
cations of the authors to whom they were 
addressed. Milton's famous "Epitaph 
upon the Admirable Dramatick Poet W. 
Shakspere " — " dear son of memory, great 
heir of fame," prefixed to the Second Folio 
Edition of Shakspere's plays (1632), and 
Wordsworth's " Sonnet to Milton," in 
the two volumes of " Poems by Wm. 
Wordsworth," first published in 1807, 
beginning, 

"Milton! thou shouldst be living at tliis hour: 
England hath need of thee," etc., 

are cases in point. 

Among the earliest specimens of this 
complimentary verse are the lines ad- 
dressed by Edmund Spenser to Gabriell 
Harvey, Doctor of Laws, printed in 1592, 
with " Foure Letters and Certaine Son- 
nettes EspeciallyTouching Robert Greene, 
and Other Parties by him Abused." In 



I S3 



an early edition of Captain John Smith's 
" History of Virginia " are prefixed almost 
a score of short poems— so called— the 
most notable, perhaps, being from the pen 
of John Donne; while, in 1616, George 
Wither congratulated his " Frend Captain 
Smyth upon his Description of New Eng- 
land," in harmonious numbers. Benge- 
mennes Jonson wrote verses " to Master 
John Fletcher upon his Faithful Shep- 
herdesse ;" Fletcher wrote verses " To 
the True Master of his Art, B. Jonson," 
which are to be found in the edition of 
"Volpone the Foxe." printed in 1607. 
Beaumont wrote verses to Fletcher and 
Jonson, as Jonson and Fletcher both 
praised him ; and so each did laud the 
other, as all three of them eulogized, or 
were eulogized by, Nat. Field and by 
Chapman and by the rest of their con- 
temporaries for pages. 

On a blank leaf of a copy of Dugdale's 
"Monasticon," Warton wrote a sonnet, 
which is printed among his collected 
poems. Neither Warton nor Dugdale is 
remembered now. The former was Pro- 
fessor of Poetry at Oxford from 1757 to 



159 



1767, Camden Professor of Ancient His- 
tory at the same university, and Poet-lau- 
reate of England from 1785 until he died 
in 1790, succeeding Whitehead, and im- 
mediately preceding Pye, in the long line 
of commonplace, half-forgotten versifiers 
who have held the office of Court Poet to 
the English kings. Sir William Dugdale 
was a distinguished antiquary in the 
seventeenth century ; his " Monasticon 
Anglicanum " (1655-73) — a chronicle of 
the monastic and other foundations in 
England before the Reformation — has 
been placed next to the Doomsday Book 
itself as the most ancient and ample record 
of the history and descent of the greater 
portion of the landed property in the 
kingdom ; and it has even been admitted 
as evidence in courts of justice when 
original titles and documents have been 
lost. 

The lines written by Warton in Dug- 
dale's great work, being comparativel}'" 
unfamiliar even to the close students of 
English verse, and representing fairly the 
class of " poetry " to which they belong, 
are given here in full. 



i6o 



" Deem not devoid of elegance the Sage 
By Fancy's genuine feelings unbeguiled, 
Of painful Pedantry the poring child, 
Who turns of these proud tomes th' historic page, 
Now sunk by Time, and Henr>''s fierce rage. 
Think'st thou the warbling Muses never smiled 
On his lone hours ? Ingenuous views engage 
His thoughts, on themes, unclassic falsely styled, 
Intent. While cloistered Piety displays 
Her mouldering roll, the piercing eye explores 
New manners, and the pomp of elder days, 
Whence culls the pensive bard his pictured stores. 
Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways 
Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers." 

Robert Burns, a contemporary of War- 
ton, frequently expressed his alTection for 
his friends upon the blank leaves of some 
favorite book before presenting the vol- 
ume to the object of his regard. " Miss 
Cruikshanks." a maiden of twelve years, 
in whose father's house in Edinburgh he 
spent some time during the winter of 
1 787-88. was addressed by Burns as "Beau- 
teous Rosebud, young and gay," on the 
page of a now - forgotten work; and on 
Januar}' i, 1787, he gave a copy of 
Bcatlie's "Minstrel" to Miss Susan Logan, 
with the following lines: 

" Again the silent wheels of time 
Their annual round luive driv'n. 



i6i 



And ycru, though scarce in maiden prime, 
Are so much nearer heav'n. 

" No gifts have I from India's coasts 
The infant year to hail ; 
I send you more than India boasts. 
In Edwin's simple tale. 

" Our sex with guile and faithless love 
Is charged, perhaps too true ; 
But may, dear maid, each lover prove 
An Edwin still to you 1" 

Miss Logan was sister to the Major 
Logan to whom Burns addressed one of 
his " Epistles ;" and " Edwin " is the hero 
of Beattie's poem. 

Some fifty years later, in 1831 or 1832, 
Campbell sent a volume of his poems to 
his cousin Mary Sinclair, with the follow- 
ing inscription : 

" Go, simple Book of Ballads, go 
From Eaton Street in Pimlico ; 
It is a gift my love to show — 

To Mary! 

" And more its value to increase, 
1 swear by all the gods of Greece 
It cost a seven-shilling piece — 

My Mary! 

" But what is gold, so bright that looks, 
Or all the coins of miser's nooks, 
Compared to be in thy good books — 
My Mar>'! 



1&2 



" Now witness earth, and skies, and main ! 
The book to thee shall appertain ; 
I'll never ask it back again — 

My Mary! 

" But what, you say, shall you bestow ? 
For, as the world now goes, you know. 
There always is a quid pro quo — 
My Mary ! 

** I ask not twenty hundred kisses, 
Nor smile the lover's heart that blesses, 
As poets ask from other misses — 
My Mary! 

" I ask that till the day you die 

You'll never pull my wig awry. 

Nor ever quiz my poetrve — 

'My Mary!" 

That our contemporary poets have been 
quite as happy in their Poetical Inscrip- 
tions as were the men of other days the 
verses which here follow will clearly prove. 
Many of these have never before been 
submitted to the public gaze, and such of 
them as are here printed for the first time 
are printed with the full consent of those 
to whom, or by whom, they are addressed. 

An uncut copy of "The Virginians," first 
edition, was sold in London the other day 
with the following inscription, in Thack- 
eray's handwriting, upon its fly-leaf: 



i63 



" In the U. States and in the Queen's dominions 
All people have a right to their opinions, 
And many don't much relish 'The Virginians.' 
Peruse my book, dear R. ; and if you find it 
A little to your taste, I hope you'll bind it. 

Peter Rackham, Esqre., with the best regards 
of the Author." 

A copy of " Prince Lucifer " presented 
to Lord Tennyson contains these lines in 
the handwriting of Mr. Alfred Austin : 

" Poet ! In other lands, where spring no more 
Fleets o'er the grass, nor in the thicket-side 
Plays at being lost and laughs to be descried, 
And blooms lie wilted on the orchard floor, 
There the sweet birds that from the Attic shore 
Across Ausonian breakers thither hied 
Own that May's music in their breast hath died, 
And sobering words resound not as before. 
But in this privileged isle, this brave, this blest. 
This deathless England, it seems always spring. 
Though riper grow the days, Song takes not wing; 
'Mid autumn boughs it builds another nest ; 
Even in the snows we lift our hearts and sing. 
And still Your voice is heard above the rest." 

As a Christmas greeting in 1876, Richard 
Henry Home sent to Mrs. Henry Edwards 
an article of his own, contributed to an 
English magazine on the cover of which 
he had pasted an embossed card contain- 
ing the following lines : 



i04 



"Though age o'er garden, field, and tree 
Must cast its thoughtful ash-gray shades, 
I send to thee 
O'er land and sea 
A Rose of Love which never fades." 

Although Mr. Frederick Locker-Lamp- 
son's library is wonderfully rich in auto- 
graph dedications and inscriptions, he 
gives but two examples in his "Cata- 
logue," printed in 1886. These are four 
lines he himself wrote in a presentation 
copy of Dr. Holmes's " Songs of Many 
Seasons," and four verses written by Mr. 
William Morris in a copy of his " Love is 
Enough," addressed as follows : 

"TO HANNAH JANE LAMPSON. 

" Spring am I, too soft of heart 
Much to speak ere I depart. 
Ask the Summer-tide to prove 
The abundance of my love. 

" Summer, looked for long, am I ; 
Much shall change or e'er I die. 
Prithee take it not amiss 
Though I weary you with bliss. 

" Laden Autumn here I stand. 
Weak of heart and worn of hand. 
Naught of rest seems good to me ; 
Say the word that sets me free. 



i65 

"I am Winter, tliat doth keep 
Longing safe amidst of sleep. 
Who shall say, if I were dead, 
Wliat should be remembered?" 

Beneath the inscription in Dr. Holmes's 
book, Mr. Locker-Lampson has written : 

** Some books are writ to sell — and don't ! 
And some are read — such heavy tomes ! 
But all should buy (though many won't) 
And read the books of Dr. Holmes." 

In a copy of one of Mr. Locker-Lamp- 
son's own books, given by the author to 
Mr. Lang, he has written as follows : 

" By Enna's fold I strayed of yore, 
I've heard the pipe, I've plucked the wheat, 
And j'et I would not give a straw 
To bide where any (Enna's) shepherds bleat. 
Give me in Shepherd's Bush a seat 
Where Pindar (classic Peter) sang, 
My Daily News, the vicious sheet 
Or pipe (if short I) of Andrew Langl" 

Mr. Edmund Gosse wrote in a copy of 
the " Hesperides " presented to Mr. Austin 
Dobson in 1878 : 

" Fresh with all airs of woodland brooks 
And scents of showers, 
Take to your haunt of holy books 
This Saint of Flowers. 



i66 



" When meadows burn with budding May, 
And heaven is blue, 
Before thy shrine our prayers we say — 
Saint Robin true ! 

" Love crowned with thorns is on thy staff— 
Thorns of svveetbrier; 
Thy benediction is a laugh ; 
Birds are thy choir. 

" Thy sacred robe of red and white 
Unction distils ; 
Thou hast a nimbus round thy head 
Of daffodils." 

In the copy of " Letters to Dead Au- 
thors " presented to Mr. Brander Mat- 
thews, Mr. Lan<^ wrote : 

" Go, letters, to the irresponsive Ghosts 

That scarce will heed them less than living Men. 
For now new Books come thicker than on Coasts 

And Meads of Asia throng the sea-birds when 
The snow-wind drives them south in clamorous Hosts 

From their salt marshes by Cayster's Fen." 

These lines, as an " Envoy," were sub- 
sequently printed in the second edition of 
the book. 

Mr. Dobson about the same time put 
the following lines in a copy of his " Old 
World Idyls," addressed to an American 
friend : 



167 



" There is no ' mighty purpose ' in this book, 
Of that I warn you at the opening page, 
Lest, haply, 'twixt the leaves you careless look, 
And finding nothing to reform the age, 
Fall with the rhyme and rhymer in a rage. 
Let others prate of problems and of powers, 
I bring but problems bom of idle hours, 
That, striving only after Art and Ease, 
Have scarcely more of moral than the flowers. 
And little else of mission than to please." 

Mr. William Ernest Henley, the collab- 
orator of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson in 
the authorship of " Deacon Brodie " and 
other plays, is the possessor of a copy of 
" Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde " in which Mr. 
Stevenson has written the following : 

" Dramatic Jekyll and dramatic Hyde, 
But which is which, let other men decide. 
To the two friends, meanwhile, the work is fun, 
And being never played, does harm to none." 

In the copy of " The Paradox of Act- 
ing," presented by Mr. Walter Herries 
Pollock to a friend who disapproved of a 
Latin and later of a French prose inscrip- 
tion it contained, the author finally wrote : 

" As no prose pleases, I must write in rhyme. 
And wish the book were better worth your time." 

In a paper upon Walter Savage Landor, 



r68 



Lowell gave to the public not long ago 
a pair of quatrains he had written in a 
copy of Landor's works presented to a 
friend upon her marriage some years be- 
fore. They are interesting as containing a 
condensation of the younger poet's judg- 
ment of the older. 

" A villa fair, with many a devious walk, 
Darkened with deathless laurel from the sun, 
Ample for troops of friends in mutual talk, 
Green Chartreuse for the reverie of one. 
Fixed here in marble, Rome and Athens gleam ; 
Here is Arcadia, here Elysium too; 
Anon an English voice disturbs our dream, 
And Landor's self can Landor's spell undo." 

In a copy of " Azarian," given to Mrs. 
T. B. Aldrich in 1866, Mrs. Harriet Pres- 
cott SpofTord wrote : 

" Full often pictured on the page 

Some reader sees a fair sweet face. 
That floats between the vacant lines 
And paints the margin with its grace. 

" Precious because th' illumined sheet, 
Though idle all its lettered lore, 
Here leaves a secret never sung, 
And spells a charm unknown before. 

" Vet pages less fortunate than mine, 
If here a fair sweet face shall bend, 
And to the trembling, happy leaf 
Pcrcliance one shade of beauty lend." 



169 



Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, having in- 
advertently written his name on the back 
instead of the front cover of a copy of 
" Afterwhiles," expressed himself thus in 
the proper place : 

"LINES ON A ERROR. 

" In the back of the book, 
With his heels in the air. 
You'll find your friend here, 
Ef you look anywhere." 

In a copy of Mr. E. C. Stedman's 
" Songs and Ballads," presented by Mr. 
H. C. Bunner to an intimate friend on 
the eve of that friend's marriage, Mr. 
Bunner wrote : 

"The new year's not too old, my friend. 
To wish a wish for you — 
That the fire may ne'er grow cold, my friend, 

That now shall shine for two ; 
The flame for kindly friendship set 
Shall blaze for Love the higher yet, 
Or be the heavens wintry wet. 
Or summer blue." 

Mr. Stedman possesses a copy of Cra- 
shaw's Poems, edition of 1670, in which 
Mr. Richard H. Stoddard had written in 
1865 the following verse: 



170 

"To E. C. S. 
" With a good long life 
And a happy end, 
These fine old songs 

From his poor old friend 

R. H. S." 

On the same fly-leaf, in the handwrit- 
ing of Mrs. Stoddard, is the inscription : 

" My omary powers 
Allow but flowers. 
'Tis for my bashaw 
To send for Crashaw. 

" E. D. B. S." 

The following quaint lines are to be 
found in a copy of Miss Ellen Mackay 
Hutchinson's " Songs and Lyrics :" 

" This little book it is so small 

You scarce can call it book at all ; 

Yet prithee grant it so much grace 

As on your shelf to keep its place, 

This little book." 

In a copy of " New Waggings from Old 
Tales," presented to Mr. Ernest D. North, 
Mr. John Kendrick Bangs, one of its au- 
thors, wrote the following lines : 

"To E. D. N. 
" If you ask for a garden with never a weed in, 
Where bloom in profusion the flowers of readin'. 
Why; go you at once to the garden of E. D. N. 



171 



To its master I send this small book of letters, 
In the hopes that, if placed on a shelf with its betters, 
When ' The Tales of the Wags ' Mr. N. is perusing, 
The wags of the Tales he'll not fall to abusing, 
But ever continue his pleasant enthusing — 

Over me, 

J. K. B." 

In a presentation copy of " Along the 
Shore," Mrs. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop 
has written : 

" Is carking care a guest, and scowls the host, 
They dwell not there to whom I send thee : 
Where cloud is least and hearty life is most. 
The H ' own the roof : to them commend me." 

And in a presentation copy of " Gettys- 
burg, a Battle Ode," are these lines by its 
author, George Parsons Lathrop : 

" Dear kinsman H , turn these leaves 

That in a chaplet I have bound 
For those whose valiant suffering grieves, 

Though they our land with glory crowned, 
And you will notice, while you turn, 

Our modern laurels are of paper, 
Yet they at least, being good to bum, 

To light Fame's torch may serve as taper." 

In the first copy of Mr. Eugene Field's 
" Echoes from the Sabine Farm," privately 
printed for Mr. Francis Wilson, Mr. Field 
wrote : 



172 



" This is a prize which cultured eyes 
Feeding upon do covet. 
And well they may, I cannot say 
How very much I love it. 

" That's why I send it to the friend 
Who favored me and brother. 
Speed, pretty tome, into the home 
Of Wilson, and no other. 

" He'll wonder what on earth he's got — 
'A birthday gift — a stunner. 
Come, Mira, look ! another book. 
And see ! a number oner !' " 

Unquestionably the worst specimen of 
this class of versification extant is the 
" Poem " written, by the author, in a copy 
of "The Curiosities of the American 
Stage," which he presented to Mr. Brand- 
er Matthews, to whom it was dedicated, 
in prose : 

" This book to Brandar, 
Whose helping hand a 
Lot did comfort and do me good. 
Accept it Brandar, 
And understand a 
Lot of gratitude understood." 

These fly-leaves contain merely a sam- 
ple of the unique treasures in this line 
which are to be found in the private li- 
braries on both sides of the Atlantic at 



173 



the present day. They are not only val- 
uable in themselves, but they are of in- 
terest as showing the possibilities of 
Poetical Inscriptions, a form of literature 
to which the bibliophiles hitherto have 
paid but little attention. They show, too, 
that the knights of the pen have a fellow- 
feeling which is not always exhibited by 
the kn'ights of the brush or by the knights 
of the chisel. While sculptors and paint- 
ers rarely dedicate their works to each 
other, authors are very apt to inscribe to 
authors the books they write — a visible 
proof that the kinship of letters is more 
pleasant and more pronounced than are 
the personal amenities of pictorial and 
plastic art. 



INDEX 



Abbey, Edwin A., 4, 26 

Addison, Joseph, 98 

Adrian, 93 

Alabaster, William, 109 

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 26, 
148-9 

Aldrich, Mrs. Thomas Bai- 
ley, 148-9, 168 

Allibone, S. Austin, 20, 109 

Anderson, Alexander, 13, 14, 
16 

Andrews, Lancelot, 105-6 

Arnold, Mathew, 25 

Aubrey, John, 36, 100, loi, 
102, III, 112, 121 

Austin, Alfred, 163 

Avery, Samuel P., 124 

Babington, Sir Anthony, 68 
Bacon, Francis, 90, 103, 113, 

117 
Bacon, John, 55 
Baker, J.. 54 

Bangs, John Kendrick, 170-1 
Banks, Sir Joshua, 60 
Barrett, Lawrence, 26 
Barrow, Isaac, 113 
Barry, James, 55 
Bartlett, John, 98 
Bartolozzi, Francesco, 6, 47, 

69,78 



Baxter, Richard, 124 
Beattie, James, 160, 161 
Beaumont, Francis, 103, 158 
Benson, John, 95-6 
Bewick, Thomas, 6, 16 
" Bickerstaff, Isaac," 132, 

136 
Blades, William, 39, 53 
Blake, William, 47 
Blount, Ed., 87 
Boker, George H., 145 
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 47 
Booth, Edwin, 26 
Bordone, Paris, 74 
Boreman, Lady Dulcibella, 

68-9 
Boreman, Sir William, 68-9 
Boswell, James, 35-6, 37, 

50. 52-3. 54. 116, 141 
Bowen, Abel, 17 
Bowland, James, 25 
Boydell, John, 69 
Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth, 

149-50 
Boyesen, Mrs H.TL, 149-50 
Bracquemond, Felix, 4 
Brantome, Peter Bourdel- 

les, 79 
Bretherton, C. 50-1 
Brome, Alexander, 97-8,113 
Brome, Richard, 96-8 



176 



Browne, Sir Thomas, 113 
Browning, Elizabeth Bar- 
rett, 148 
Browning, Robert, 148 
Bryan, Michael, 95 
Buckingham, George Vil- 

liers, Duke of, 86 
Bulwer, Edward Robert, 

Lord Lytton, 145 
Bunner, H. C, 147, 169 
Bunyan, John, 118, 124 
Burchet, Josiah, 141 
Burleigh, Robert (sth Lord), 

74 
Burleigh, William Cecil, 

Lord, 76 
Burnet, John, 13, 14 
Burns, Robert, 141, 160 
Burton, John Hill, 37-S, 49, 

50, 51-2 
Bute, Marquis of (Lord 

Mountstuart), 37 
Buttre, John, 51 
Byrd, William (1st), lo-ii 
Byrd, William (2d> 11, 12 
Byrd, William (3d), 11, 12 
Byron, Lord, 145 

Callender,Mr. (engraver), 13 
Camden, William, go 
Campbell, Thomas, 161-2 
Carlisle, Earl of, 65 
Carwood, Amyas, 69 
Cassellis, Earl of, 76-7 
Castlemaine, Lady, 91, 94 
Catullus, 133-4 
Chalmers, George, 60 
Chapman, George, 86, 108, 
158 



Charles T., 64, 66, 70, 76, 94, 

108, no 
Charles IL, 68 
Charles IX. (of France), 64, 

67 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 125-6, 

127, 136-7, 140 
Chew, Beverly, 14, 84, 94, 

102, 105, 112 
Cliilds, George W., 27 
Churchill, Charles, 142-3 
Clarendon Edward Hyde, 

Earl of, 36 
Clouet, Francois. (See Janet) 
Cocker, Edward, 113-16 
Colbert, Jean Baptist, 44 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 

117, 143 
Collier, Jeremy, 124 
Congreve, William, 100 
" Coolidge, Susan " (Sarah 

C. Woolsey), 145-6 
Cornelius Nepos, 134 
Cowley, Abraham, 93, 119 
Covvper, William, 117 
Cowper, William (Baron of 

Wingham^ 132 
Crashaw, Richard, 169-70 
Critz, John de, 62 
Croker, John Wilson, 52 
Cruikshanks, Miss, 160 
Curie, Barbara, 70-1 
Curie, Elizabeth, 69-71 
Curie, Gilbert, 70-1 
Cure, Cornelius, 61-2 
Cure, William, 62 
Cushmau, Charlotte, 20-1 

Davenant, Sir Wm., 94, in 



177 



Davies, John (of Hereford), 

95- '03-4 
Dawkius, Henry, 13-14 
Defoe, Daniel, 100 
Deiaram, Francis, 108 
Denbigh, Earl of, 64 
Dering, Thomas, 13 
Dibdin, Thomas F., 38, 49, 

50. 51 
Dickens, Charles, 145 
Dobtfon, Austin, 146, 165-6, 

166-7 
Donne, John, 86, 90, 118, 

138, 158 
Dooliitle, Amos, 13, 17-18 
Douglas, George, 61 
Douglas, Sir William, 61 
Drayton, Michael, 90, 94, 

103, 108 
Droeshout, John, 86 
Droeshout, Martin (elder), 

86 
Droeshout, Martin (young- 
er), 83-9r, 105, 127 
Droeshout, Michael, 86 
Dryden, John, 123, 124, 127, 

137-8 
Duane, James, 106 
Dugdale,Sir William, 158-60 
Dunlap, William, 14 
Durand, Asher B., 18 
Diirer, Albert, 4, 5, 42 
D'Urfey, Thomas, 98-roo 
Duyckinck, Evret A., 21 
Duyckinck, George L., 21 

Edwards, Mrs. Henry, 163-4 
Egeleston, Edward, 27 
Elder, William, y6 
12 



Elizabeth, Queen, 33,62,67, 

77. 108 
Elliston, Robert, 12 
Evelyn, John, 43-5, gi, 109 
Everett, Edward, ig 

Fairfax, George William, 88 
Faithorne, William, 90-2, 

93-4, 122-3. 127 
Ferguson, Elizabeth Graem, 

21 
Field. Eugene, 171-2 
Field, Nathaniel, 158 
Finden, E., 52, 54 
Fiske, John, 4 
Flatman, Thomas, 92-3, 124 
Fletcher, John, go, 103, 158 
Florio, John, 108 
Foote, Charles B., 122-3 
Forster, John, 145 
Francis I., 64, 74 
Francis II., 64, 67, 75-6, 77, 

79 
Francis, John W., 48, 50, 51 
Franklin, Benjamin, 10 
Franklin, John, 10 
Eraser Tytler, Patrick, 66-7, 

76 
Froude, James Anthony, 79 
Fuller,Thomas, 36, ic6, lu- 

13 

Garrick, David, 27-8 

Gay, John, 141 

George I., 34 

George III-, 70 

Godwin, Mary Wollstoncraft 

(Mrs. Shelley), 144 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 145 



'78 



Gordon, Watson, 72 
Gosse, Edmund, 165-6 
Gower, John, 137 
Granger, James, 33-5''^ 104- 

5, 110, 120, 124, 140 
Greene, George W., 145 
Greene, Robert, 157 
Greenwood, Mr., 37 
Griswold, Rufus Wilmot, 21 
Grove, Harriet, 144 

Hackett, John, 106 

Hall, H. B.. 51 

Halliwell -Phillips, James 

O., 8s 
Hamilton, James, Marquis 

of, 86 
Harding, J.. 55 
Harvey, Gabriell, 157 
Hatlon, Edward, 115 
Hawkins, Francis, 1 19-21 
Hawkins, John, 120-21 
Heath, J.. 54, 55 
Heere, Lucas de, 6f 
Henley. William Ernest. 167 
Henry II. (of France), 64, 

6S 
Henry III. (of France), 64 
Henry VIII. (of England), 

108, 137 
Henry, Prince of Wales, 

103, 108 
Herbert, George, 116-18,124 
Herrick, Robert, 90 
Herring, James, 51 
Hocclcve, Thomas, 125-6 
Hoey, Mrs. John, 48 
Hogarth, William, 6, 141 
Hogenberg, R., 43 



Holbein, Hans (younger), 

74. 'oS 
Hole, William, 106-8 
Holland, Abraham, 95 
Holland, Henry, 43 
Hollar. Wenceslaus, 47, 91 
Holle, William, 106-8 
Hollman, Julius, 51 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 

23-5, 117, 164, 165 
Holt, Neville, 77 
Hood, Thomas, 143 
Hooker, Richard, 94 
Horace, 98, 133 
Home, Richard Henry, 

163-4 
Howard, J. J., 19 
Howson, John, 88 
Hugo, Victor, 23 
Humphrey, Ozias, 55 
Hunt, Leigh, 143 
Hurd, Nathaniel, 13. 22 
Hutchinson, Ellen Mackay, 

21, 170 

laggard, Isa.ic, 87 
Ingelow, Jean, 20 
Ireland, Joseph Norton, 48, 
50, 5' 

Jacob, Giles, 99 

Jaggard, Isaac, 87 

James I. and VI., 61, 68, 72, 

76, 103, 107, 108 
James II., 70 
James V. (of Scotland), 78 
Janet (Francois Clouet), 

O4-6, 77 
Jehannet- (See Janet) 



179 



Johnson, Samuel, 35, 37, 52, 

53-5. 116, 141 
Johnson, Mrs. Samuel, 53 
Jonson, Benjamin, 83-4, 87, 

88,90,94-6, 103, 105, III, 

158 

Keats, John, 143 
Killigrew, Thomas, 94 
Kneller, Geoffrey, 124 
Knollies, Sir Francis, 78 

Labanof, Prince, 67, 73 
Lamb, Charles, 109 
Lampson, Hannah Jane, 

164-5 
Lampson. (See Frederick 

Locker) 
Landor, Walter Savage, 

167-8 
Lang, Andrew, 20, 134-6, 

165, 166 
Langbaine. Gerard, 97 
Langton, Beiniet, 54 
Langton, George, 52 
Lathrop, George Parsons, 

171 

Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne, 
171 

Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 52 

Lawrence, Thomas W., 56 

Leicester, Earl of, 138 

Lely, Peter, 91 

Leslie, Frank, 48 

Lichenstein, Richard C, 12, 
14, 18-19 

Locker- Lampson, Freder- 
ick, 146-7, 164-5 

Logan, Major, 161 



Logan, Susan, r6o-i 
Loggan, David, 113, 124 
Fongfellow, Henry W., 145 
Louis XIV., 44 
Lounsbury, Thomas R., 125 
Lowell, James Russell, 148, 

168 
Lowndes, William Thomas, 

114 
Lucian, 11 1 
Lytton - Bulwer, Edward 

Robert, 145 

Maecenas, 133 
Malone, Edmund, 54, 88 
Marriot, Richard, 45 
Marshall, William, 6, 89-90, 

95, 102, no, 118, 122, 127 
Mary of Guise, 63-4, 78 
Mary, Queen of Scots, 47, 

50, 53, 59-79 
Matthews, Brander, 26, 134, 

147, 166, 172 
Mauran, James Eddy, 18 
Maverick, Peter, 13, 17, 18, 

22 
Maverick, Peter R., 13, 17, 

18, 22 
May, Thomas, 90, no- 11 
Melville, Sir James, 77 
Meres, Francis, 62 
Milton, John, 94, 12 1-5, 157 
Milton, Mrs. John (ist), 122 
Milton. Mrs. John (3d), 123 
Moli^re, 26 
More, Sir Thomas, 90 
Moreau, Charles C, 17, 56 
Morel], Tliomas, 126 
Morris, William, 164 



i8o 



Morton, Earl of, 60-61 
Moseley, Humphrey, ui 
Mountstuart, Lord ( Marquis 

of Hutel. 37 
Murray, John (ad), 53 

Nanteuil, Robert, 44, O' 
Napier, Lord, 63-4 
Neil. P. G. J., 65 
Nepos, Cornelius, 134 
Noble, Mark, 34 
Nollekins, Joseph, 55 
North, Ernest D.. 170-1 
Northcote. James. 55 
Norton, Charles Eliot, 148 
Nottingham, Earl of, 43-4 

Occleve, Thomas, 125-6 
Offley, John. 139-40 
Oliver, Isa.ic, 74 
Onslow, Arthur, 123 
Opie, John, 55 
Oikncy, Earl of, 72 
Ormond, Duchess of, 137-8 
Ovcrbury. Sir Thomas, 86 
*' Owen Mcrcditli," 145 

Page, Samuel, 138-9 
Parker, Matthew, 43 
Pass, Sirnf)n, 105, 109, 113 
Payne, John, 10S-9, lao 
Peake, William, 94 
Pepyii. Samuel, 43-5» 9'. 94. 

1 15-16, 124 
Pepys, Mrs. Samuel, 44 
Phillips, Thomas, 51 
Pinkethman, William, 131 
Pliny, 42 
Pollock, Walter Hcrries, 167 



Pope, Alexander, 14, 92-3, 

14' 
Poulet-Malassis, A. P., 21, 

22, 23 
Prescott, William H., 19 
Primevra, Jacopo, 75 
Pye, Henry James, 159 

Qiiarles, Francis, 90, 109-10 
Qiiarles, John, 9"^, iio-ii 

Rackham, Peter, 163 
RaleiRh, Sir Walter, 95 
Ramsay, Allan, 140-1 
Revere, Paul, 13, 14-15, 16, 

iS 
Reynolds, Frances, 55 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 52, 

53-5 
Richardson, Jonathan, 41 
Richardson, .Samuel, 140 
Richardson, W., 105 
Riley, Hnmbolt, 150 
Riley, James Whitcomb, 

150, 169 
Rof;et, Peter Mark, 24 
Ross, Alexander, 110 

Sage, Dean, 27 

Sa]>pho, 93 

Scharf, CJeorp;e, S7-9 

Scott, Sir Walter, 69-70,141, 

«44-.S 
Scott, Winfield, 19 
Seton, David, 73 
Seton, Lord, 67 
Seton, Mary, 78 
Seton. William, 73 
Sesvcll, Harriet W., 145 



i8i 



Sewell, Samuel E., 145 
Shakspere, 47, 53, 83-9I) 94, 

103, 105, 121, 156, 157 
Shelley, Harriet Westbrook, 

144 
Shelley, Mary Wollston- 

craft Godwin, 144 
Shelley, Percy Bysche, 144 
Shirley, James, 90 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 103, 138 
Sinclair, Mary, 16 1-2 
Smith, Captain John, 95, 

102-5, 107, 158 
Sommers, Will, 108 
Southey, Robert, log, 145 
Speed, John, 49 
Spenser, Edmund, 138, 157 
Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 

168 
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 

21, 25, 146, 147, 169-70 
Steele, Richard, 92-3, 131-2, 

133, 140, 157 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 

135-6. 167 
Stewart, Mr., 67 
Stoddard, Richard H., 145, 

169-70 
Stoddard, Mrs. R. H., 170 
Strickland, Agnes, 69 
Stuart, Mary, Queen of 

Scots, 47, 50, 53, 59-79 
Stuart, Robert, Earl of Ork- 
ney, 72 
Sturt, John, 1 17-18 
Suckling, Sir John, 90,101-2 
Sutherland, Duke of, 54, 71 
Swinburne, Algernon Chas., 

145 



Taylor, Bayard, 145 
Taylor, Jeremy, 94 
Taylor, John, 140 
Taylor, Tom, 55 
Tennyson, Alfred, 163 
Terrence, 103 

Thackeray, Wm. M., 162-3 
Thomson, James, 51 
Toedtberg, Augustus, 56 
Tonson, Jacob, 14, 123-4 
Tredwell, Daniel M., 39 
Trelawney, Edward Chas., 

145 
Trent, George, 56 
Trotter, S. C. , 55 
Turner, James, 13 

Urry, John, 126 

Vander Gucht, Michael, 100 
Vandyck, Anthony, 74 
Van Hove, F. H., 113 
Varick, Richard, 16 
Vaughan, Robert, 94-5, 96, 

112 
Vertue, George, 6,42,47,74, 

99, 100, 122-3, 124, 125-7 
Victoria, Queen, 70, 76 
Villiers, George, Duke of 

Buckingham, 86 
Virgil, 138 

Wallack, John Lester, 48 
Walpole, Horace, 34-5, 36, 

43, 60, 63, 67, 91, 95, 105, 

log, 124, 127 
Walton, Izaak, 36, 45-6, 90, 

117, n8-i9, 138-40 
Warburton, William, 142-3 



1^2 



Ward, Edward, 99-101 
Ward, Mrs. Edward, 100, 

lOI 

Warner, Charles Dudley, 104 
Warton, Thomas, 158-60 
Washington, Andrew, 8-9 
Washington, George, 9, 16, 

27. 47 
Washington, John, 8-9 
Watts, Isaac, 49 
Webster, Daniel, 19 
Welbrook, Harriet {Mrs. 

Shelley), 144 
Wheatley, Henry B., 133,138 
White, Robert, 123, 124 
Whitehead, William, 159 



Whittier, John G., 117, 145, 

147 
Whyte, Nicholas, 76 
Wilkie, Sir David, 71 
Wingham, William Cow- 

per, Baron of, 132 
Wilson, Francis, 171-2 
Winstanley, William, 113 
Wither, George, 106-9, 158 
Woolsey, Sarah C. (" Susan 

Coolidge"), 145-6 
Wordsworth, William, 157 
Wynne, William, 137 

ZofTany, John, 55 
Zuccaro,Krederigo, 67,68,74 



THE END 



By LAURENCE HUTTON. 



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